FACTUAL RIDDLES XLVII

1. How much money did the Pilgrims borrow in 1620 to finance their journey, and at what interest rate?

2. Why is a computer failure often blamed on a "bug?"

Answers:

1. The Pilgrims borrowed $7,000 from a London company of 70 investors at an interest rate of 43%.  It took 23 years to pay off the debt.

2. It may not have been the first time that a mysterious mechanical failure was blamed on a "bug," but Grace Murray Hopper, one of the first computer programmers and a Navy captain says she was there when the term was first applied to a computer failure - and she has the bug to prove it.

At Harvard one summer night in 1945, Hopper says, she and her associates were working on a "grandaddy" of today's computers, the Mark II. "Things were going badly - something was wrong in one of the relays of the long, glass-enclosed computer," says Hopper. "Finally someone located the trouble spot and, using ordinary tweezers, removed the problem, a moth. From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it."

The historic moth's remains are taped to a page of Hopper's 1945 logbook, and a picture of the bug appeared in the July, 1981 issue of the Annals of the History of Computing.

Credits: From Reader's Digest
1. L.M. Boyd
2. Albin Krebs and Robert McG. Thomas, Jr.