Stalking the elusive computer bug? Seek no more. Welcome to the weekend’s entomological footnote.
On 9 September 1947, at a quarter to four, someone found a moth stuck in Relay #70 of Harvard’s Mark II computer. They taped it into the log book and wrote, “First actual case of bug being found.” Do notice the word “actual”. You only write that if everyone already calls a fault a bug. At Harvard, IBM’s engineers had taught the staff the word in 1944.
The log book, the Smithsonian tells us, was probably not Grace Hopper’s. She told the story often, and stories have a way of settling on whoever tells them most. She and the Mark II team did help spread “bug” and “debug” among programmers.
The word comes from the telegraph. Edison’s quadruplex had faults called bugs, and his workarounds were called bug traps. In 1878 he wrote to Western Union’s president about a bug in his telephone apparatus, of the genus “callbellum”. Nobody has found a specimen.
In 1889 the Pall Mall Gazette explained Edison’s bug as an imaginary insect hiding inside his phonograph, and it took fifty-eight more years for one brave moth to go where no moth had one before.
Speaking of bugs, we’re doing some debugging of our own.
AI moves fast, but it still comes down to silicon, power and architectural limits. We can’t understand what comes next without knowing whose shoulders we stand on: the pioneers, the engineering gambles and the people behind the chips. That’s why we run a TIL on Saturdays and a quiz on Sundays.
We want Semi Doped to earn its place in your inbox, Sundays included. So we’re pausing the quiz today to ask: what are we not covering that you want to read? Would you swap the quiz or the TIL for something else? If so, what?
Leave your ideas in the comments. We can’t promise to write about every one, but we’ll read every word and use it to shape what comes next.
And so we know who we’re writing for, a quick poll on your day job:
Engineers & Architects: I design/build silicon, hardware systems, or low-level software.
Execs, Founders & Investors: I track strategy, capital allocation, and market dynamics in tech.
Adjacent Tech Pros & Product: I work in tech/AI/software and want to understand the physical stack.
Students, Researchers & Lifelong Learners: I’m here out of pure curiosity and a love for deep tech history.