THE ADMIRAL'S BUG

Photo by James S. Davis [Public domain],
via Wikimedia Commons

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper of the US Navy is usually credited with coining the term "bug" and "debugging" with reference to a malfunction in a computer and the subsequent repair of that malfunction.  In 1947, when she was working on a primitive computer at Harvard University called the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator, her associates found an actual moth which had been shorting out a circuit (the moth is pictured below and is now enshrined at the Smithsonian Institute), and she allegedly came up with these terms as a result.  However, most entymologists (and entomologists, for that matter) believe that the origin of "bug" as a synonym for glitch originated at a much earlier time.

By Courtesy of the Naval Surface Warfare Center,
Dahlgren, VA., 1988. [Public domain],
via Wikimedia Commons