Peter Rukavina's Podcast

In the summer of 1996 I presented a series on CBC Radio’s Island Morning program, produced by Ann Thurlow, called Consumed by Technology. I’ve managed to recover the audio of the episodes, along with the “show notes” and transcripts, from The Internet Archive and I’m posting each episode here for posterity. This sixth episode of Consumed by Technology focused on computer bugs; it aired on August 13, 1996. Karen Mair was the host. Late one August night in 1945, U.S. Navy Captain Grace Hopper and her co-workers were hard at work in their computer lab at Harvard University. They were frustrated. Their project, a pioneering computer called the “Mark One” wasn’t working. And after trying everything they could think of, they still couldn’t figure out why. Finally, someone located the trouble spot: using ordinary tweezers, they extracted a two-inch moth from the computer’s insides, a moth that was causing the computer to short-circuit. And so was born the world’s first “computer bug”. Transcript INTRO: Late on