> she started tracing the problem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bug#History says
] Hopper did not find the bug, as she readily acknowledged. The date in the log book was September 9, 1947.[12][13][14] The operators who found it, including William "Bill" Burke, later of the Naval Weapons Laboratory, Dahlgren, Virginia,[15] were familiar with the engineering term and amusedly kept the insect with the notation "First actual case of bug being found."
To confirm that, here's an audio recording of Hopper relating that story: https://archive.org/details/podcast_from-archives_grace-hopp... starting at 16:12.
You'll see she says "they found the failing relay" and "the operator got a pair of tweezers ... and below it he wrote “First actual case of bug being found.”"
In her 1968 interview at https://amhistory.si.edu/archives/AC0196_hopp681100.pdf she uses "we", which I take to mean "members of the project team", and not specifically "she was part of the people looking" - though she may have been!
Though also note she says 1945, when the log book shows it was 1947.
] And, one night she conked out, and we went to look for the bug and found an actual large moth, about four inches wing span, in one of the relays beaten to death, and we took it out and put it in the log book and pasted scotch tape over it, and as far as I know, that's still in the historical log book up at Harvard (we found an actual bug in the computer).
The log book is at the Smithsonian. https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nma... comments that "This log book was probably not Hopper's."
What is your source that Hopper was the one who found the moth and that she wrote it in the log?
> So this is the story of first computer bug.
https://chsi.harvard.edu/harvard-ibm-mark-1-language notes four terms which entered programming through the Mark I, not the Mark II. These are: "Loop", "Patch", "Library", and "Bug" - with images of the physical nature of the first three! For the latter it says (emphasis mine):
] The "Bug"
] Before 1944, electrical engineers already used the term "bug" to refer to hard-to-find physical defects that hindered the operation of an electric device. The Mark I team appropriated the term for unexpected problems in the "coding" of a problem. Above are cartoons drawn by Grace Hopper of the different types of bugs encountered during her work.
The paper "Stalking the Elusive Computer Bug" by Peggy Aldrich Kidwell (doi:10.1109/85.728224) date those cartoons to 1945, and gives other pre-Mark II examples of using 'bug' for the Mark I:
] I. B. Cohen has examined a photocopy of the logbook kept by Robert Campbell, a young physicists at the Computation Laboratory. It tersely summarizes hours spent finding and correcting errors. On 17 April 1944, Campbell wrote, "Ran test program. Mr. Durfee from I.B.M. was here to help us find 'bugs.'"
and Hopper writing "a debugging note to operators" in 1945/1946 and "errors in mathematics and tape bugs pursued and captured by Ensign Bloch and Ensign Campbell."
I think that's conclusive that the famous 1947 bug is not the first computer bug.