Endless Curiosity about science, math and universe

In short: In 1947, operators at Harvard taped a dead moth into a logbook and joked it was the "first actual case of bug being found." Grace Hopper did not find that moth — and the word "bug" was already seventy years old. Her real achievement was bigger: she built the first compiler, taught computers to understand English-like words, and stayed on active Navy duty until she was seventy-nine. The moth she did not find Engineers had called small machine faults "bugs" since the 1800s — Edison used the word in a letter in 1878. So when Hopper's team found a moth trapped in Relay 70 of the Mark II in September 1947, the logbook entry was a joke: the metaphorical bug had finally appeared with real wings. That playful page now rests in the Smithsonian. Hopper retold the story for decades, but she never claimed the moth as her own crown. A compiler, when nobody believed in one Hopper had joined the Naval Reserve in 1943 under a special exemption — the Nav...

In short: In February 1946 the world applauded ENIAC as the first computer. At that same moment, across the Atlantic, a machine that had already been running for three years was being taken apart in silence. Colossus — built by Tommy Flowers, a Post Office telephone engineer and the son of a bricklayer — had spent the war reading the German high command's most secret orders. One precision matters: Colossus was not a general-purpose computer like today's machines. It was an electronic codebreaking machine, set up with switches and plugboards for one family of tasks. Its builder's story is the remarkable part. A bricklayer's son who learned why valves survive Thomas Harold Flowers was born in 1905 in London's East End. There was no money for university, so he apprenticed as a mechanic by day and earned an engineering degree in evening classes. At the Post Office research station at Dollis Hill he worked on replacing the clattering metal switches of telephone exchan...