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In the beginning, there was the ENIAC Mark I. One day an operator happened to notice that the machine was malfunctioning and traced the problem to a moth that had flown into the machine and gotten beaten to death by the relay contacts.
She removed the moth, taped it in the log book, and made a notation: "Found a bug in the system." Thus, the first computer bug. [1]
My introduction to computer bugs came long after this. I wrote my first program at age 11. It was one assembly language instruction long. The program added together 2 + 2. The result was 2. The program was only one instruction long and it still had a bug in it.
This chapter contains a few "firsts": the first time I stayed up to 2:00 in the morning to locate a bug (Program 3), the first question on the first C programming test I administered (Program 2), and, of course, the first program in any programming book, "Hello World."
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Before the days of ATMs you had to go to the bank and manually make a deposit. Usually you would use one of the preprinted deposit slips found in the back of your checkbook. These came with your account number written in magnetic ink on the bottom of the slip.
If you ran out of slips, the bank would provide you with one. It had no number written at the bottom, so when it was processed using the bank's automatic machinery, so the machine kicked it out and a clerk manually entered the account number.
A crook printed up his own version of the "generic" deposit slip. It looked like the normal "generic" deposit slip, except that the crook's account number was printed in magnetic ink at the bottom.
He then went to the bank and slipped these slips into the bins holding the "generic" slips.
The scam worked this way: A customer entered the bank to make a deposit and got one of the doctored slips. He filled it out and made a deposit. Since the slip contains an account number, the computer automatically processed it and made a deposit into the account written on the bottom. Ignored was the handwritten account number on the slip. In other words, our crook was hijacking deposits.
A detective assigned to the case was baffled. Deposits were disappearing and no one knew how. He narrowed it down to deposits made in the bank. He decided to try and make a large number of deposits and see what would happen. Since he was using his own money, the deposits would have to be very small. Very very small. In fact they were for 6¢ each.
The detective spent a week making deposits. He would go to the bank, fill out a slip, get in line, make a deposit for 6¢, fill out a new slip, get in line, make a deposit for 6¢, and so on. The clerks thought he was crazy. One day, one of his deposits disappeared. So he had the bank search its records to see if anyone else had made a 6¢ deposit that day. Someone had, and the crook was caught.
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[1]Although people believe that this was the first use of the word bug in conjunction to computing machine it was not. The term bug had been around for a long time before that to describe all sorts of machinery faults. But why let the truth spoil a good story?
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