Grace Hopper telling the bug story, saying that [
THIS PART MIGHT BE WRONG, SEE BELOW: she was there but] the bug was extracted from the relay and the note written in the logbook by “the operator”:
> “We were building Mark II on the summer of 1945 [...] Mark II stopped. We finally located the failing relay, it was one of the big signal relays, and inside the relay, beaten to death by the relay contacts, was a moth about this big.”
> “So the operator got a pair of tweezers and very carefully fished the moth out of the relay, put it in the logbook, put scotch tape over it, and below it he wrote «first actual bug found».”
> “I’m sure you'll be glad to know that the bug is still under the log under the scotch tape in the log book. It’s in the museum at the Naval Surface Weapons Center [now Naval Surface Warfare Center https://www.navy.mil/NAVAL-SURFACE-WARFARE-CENTER-DAHLGREN/] at Dahlgren Virginia.”
> “Now I’ve told that story a lot of times but it turned out some people didn’t believe me. Among them the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, so they made an expedition to Dahlgren and sure enough they found the bug under the scotch tape in the log book so they took a picture of it, and they published it in the July 1981 Annals of the History of Computing. So the first bug is now legal, and I think it’s rather nice that the Navy is preserving some of the early artifacts like the first bug, and me, and a few other things.”
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABlivzyfhQE&t=518s
Now, what the author of the linked article (Lunduke) is disputing is the distorted re-telling of this story by others. Grace Hopper did not claim that the writing was hers or that it was the origin of the term “bug” applied to computers, that was sloppy journalists.
There is one small detail in Lunduke’s article that I could criticize:
> “Nor was it found or recorded by Grace Hopper.”
She did not record it as noted above, but she clearly says that she was part of the group that “debugged” Mark II that day.
Edit to add: see also eesmith’s comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32518611
Edit 2: the comment by psychoslave links to the Wikipedia page without further context, and there it says that Hopper was not present when the moth was found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bug#cite_ref-huggins_...
Following the citations in that section of the Wikipedia page, I got this:
> “During the 1986 interviews, Gene Gleirsner and
Ralph Niemann recalled that the Mark II operator
who found the bug and taped it into the logbook
was Bill Burke, who later moved to Dahlgren as a
computer operator.”
> “Howard Aiken's Third Machine: The Harvard Mark III Calculator or Aiken-Dahlgren Electronic Calculator”, in “IEEE Annals of the History of Computing” January-March 2000, vol. 22, page 81: https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/an/2000/01/man2000010...
I haven’t been able to find any clear mention by Grace Hopper on whether she was there when the moth was found: in the video I linked at the top she might have said “They finally located” instead of “We finally located” as I heard. If she wasn’t there, then Lunduke’s article would be, AFAICT, completely correct. It is in any case way more correct than others I’ve read.