I once saw some of it when I was in the military. You may find this interesting:

http://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/comphist/eniac-story.html


>>>>A few years ago I visited a museum in London where they house one of the very first electrical computers ever built. It was this huge contraption with a number of relays that clunked shut or sprang open in order to generate on-off bit arrays. Not only did the programmers of that computer have to debug their code, but they had to actually literally debug the computer itself by scraping off cockroaches that occasionally got squished between the relays and thereby insulating the contact. Hence the term "debugging". Talk about the good old days of computing! In the same vein, I am sure that a hundred years from now programmers will look at what we do/did today and shake their collective head at the primitiveness of it all...
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>>>Pertti
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>>>Good story but the term is generally attributed to Admiral Grace Hopper.
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>>Well, all I know this is what the museum guide told me. Not that it really matters that much who said it first, but I do tend to trust museum personnel over Wikipedia, which really is just "truth by consensus" Web 2.0 concept. So, call me old fashioned <g>.
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>FWIW, I've seen the term attributed to Hopper in far more places than just Wikipedia. I've heard this story for 30 or more years.
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>Also, fwiw, in the Moore Building at the University of Pennsylvania (where I went to school), they have a small museum with some of the pieces of the ENIAC, generally considered to be the first digital computer.
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>http://www.seas.upenn.edu/%7Emuseum/
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>Tamar