3 Quotes by Kathleen Broome Williams

It was warm in the summer of 1945; the windows were always open and the screens were not very good. One day the Mark II stopped when a relay failed. They finally found the cause of the failure: inside one of the relays, beaten to death by the contacts, was a moth. The operator carefully fished it out with tweezers, taped it in the logbook, and wrote under it “first actual bug found.

After a few months she turned to her brother in frustration and he found the problem: every now and then she had used octal when figuring her balance. Hopper realized that she could not work in octal all day and then live in a normal decimal world the rest of the time. Her answer was not that she should learn octal better, but that the computer should learn decimal. At this point the germ of an idea came to her to let the machine do the dirty work; she would instruct it in her own language.

Machine problems, called bugs, were very often caused by fraying of the brushes on the counters, which caused them to spark. When this happened, the operators would go to Hopper and borrow the little mirror from the handbag she always had with her. Then they turned the lights off and held the mirror down into the machinery to locate where the counters were sparking.