The first to debug a computer

© Mark Ollig

In 1947, a team of engineers, including computer pioneer and programmer Grace Murray Hopper, discovered the cause of the problem preventing electrical current from flowing through a circuit.

The circuit was inside the ten-foot-high, 3,000-square-foot Harvard Mark II electromechanical computer built in 1945 and located at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA.

Hopper was undoubtedly surprised upon discovering the cause of the current-flow interruption between the metal conducting points on one electromagnetic relay.

The culprit was a moth that had become stuck in the relay, interrupting circuit flow.

Removing the moth allowed the flow of current through the relay, which resumed its regular operation.

The Harvard Mark II computer operations logbook update read, “Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay.”

The cause of the problem, a Lepidopteran insect, in this case, a moth, was taped on the logbook page with the following note, “First actual case of bug being found.”

Over the years, credit has been given to Hopper for originating the frequently used phrase “I found a bug in the computer.”

The computer terms “bug” and “debugging” became commonly used in the early 1950s and 1960s.

I learned the word “bug,” used in a technical sense, was first coined by Thomas Edison during the 1870s while working on a quadruplex electrical telegraph.

Hopper has been recognized for popularizing the computing term “bug” since her team found an actual bug causing a computer problem.

On Sept. 9, we will observe the 75th anniversary of the bug she and her team debugged from a computer.

Within some computing circles, folks still debate whether a moth should be considered a bug or an insect.

The encyclopedia says moths are in the butterfly family, belonging to the order of Lepidoptera, which are nocturnal flying insects.

High school biology class taught us insects are in the Insecta class, which is part of the phylum Arthropoda group.

“I found a bug in my computer,” or, “I found an insect in my computer.”

I will go with “bug.”

Many (very many) years ago, this columnist regularly worked with an electromechanical switching platform using electromagnetic relays.

From 1960 until the end of 1986, the telephone company in Winsted provided dial-tone telephone calling services using a GTE-Leich TPS (terminal per station) electromechanical relay-operating telephone switching system.

Some of my readers may remember being given a tour of the telephone switching system when you stopped by the office or were in school and visited as part of a class trip.

Tall rows of cabinets containing electromechanical relay bars once filled the central office of the Winsted Telephone Company.

The 11-foot-high by 4-foot-wide steel frames housed cabinet bays wired with hundreds of vertically-positioned electromechanical relay bars, with some having thin, carbon filament lamps glowing during electrical circuit activity.

Every cabinet bay was enclosed with a thin metal frame and a clear plastic cover to protect the relay bars’ circuitry.

Each bar measured approximately three feet tall by four inches-deep by 3-inches-wide and contained five to twenty individual relays of various sizes.

A person could determine how busy the telephone switching system was processing phone calls by the number of glowing carbon filament lamps and the audible level of relays clicking.

The more lights and clicking, the higher the processing volume of telephone calls.

Over time, carbon-like oxidation would build up on the relay contact points, acting as an insulating agent and thus preventing electrical current flow.

We used a burnishing tool with a very fine sandpaper-like abrasive on a thin metal strip to remove this oxidation.

While moving the burnishing tool in a back-and-forth, filing-like motion, we would lightly sand off the oxidation covering the metallic contacts of the relay.

Accumulation of dust could also interfere with a relay’s operation.

Part of our central office preventive maintenance included scheduled dust-removal cleaning of individual relay bars.

During routine maintenance or repair, we removed an electromechanical relay bar and took it outside (usually on the sidewalk in front of the telephone office).

We sprayed high-pressured air onto the relay contacts using a portable air compressor to blow away any dust or small particles.

So that you know, we never found any bugs or insects between the metal conducting contact points of the relays.

There may be a few of these old-fashioned electromechanical relay-operating telephone switching platforms still working; however, I doubt it – unless they are in a museum.

The Harvard Mark II computer operations logbook (including the moth) is kept in the History of American Technology Museum of the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. You can see this page at https://s.si.edu/3z74ewy.

Grace Murray Hopper, recognized as one of the first to “debug” a computer, was born on Dec. 9, 1906, in New York City, NY. She died on Jan. 1, 1992, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

My video of a never-used, 62-year-old electromechanical relay-operating “firebar” from the Winsted Telephone Company can be seen at https://bit.ly/3Bc6lSe.

Here is to hoping none of you will find any bugs (or insects) in your computer, relays, or bed.

OXO for the win

© Mark Ollig

Across the pond in Britain, 70 years ago, someone played the first electronic video game pitting a human against a computer.

Digital calculating computers with electronic functionality, programmability, and memory-storing were engineered and built in earnest shortly after the Second World War.

In 1947, British computer scientist John Maurice Wilkes assisted designing and constructing the digital Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) computer in the mathematical laboratory at the University of Cambridge in England.

EDSAC is a name many have forgotten, but folks should remember it as the first practical stored-program control digital computer.

With over 500 square feet of 12 vertical racks, EDSAC contains 3,500 electronic vacuum tubes and mechanical enclosures containing refreshable "mercury ultrasonic delay lines" for the computer's 512 (17-bit per word) memory.

Mercury was used because the element's acoustic impedance mimics piezoelectric quartz crystals, which convert mechanical energy into electricity.

On the computer's monitoring desk sits a rectangular, metal display cabinet measuring roughly 2 feet by 2 feet.

The cabinet contains three electronic VCR97 curved cathode-ray tubes (CRT) display/status monitors.

The 9-inch diameter CRT monitors are labeled: counter, memory, and sequence control. These picture tube monitors are wired into the computer.

The monitoring desk also held an electromechanical paper tape reader. The reader inputs data into the EDSAC computer using a five-hole punched teleprinter paper.

The tape reader operated at 6 2/3 characters per second.

A British-made Creed tape-printing teleprinter working at a speed of 50 baud (about 66 words a minute) sits on the monitoring desk, receiving output data from the EDSAC computer, which executes instructions at a rate of 500 kHz.

A magnetic tape drive unit was added to the EDSAC but did not function accurately enough to be used during data processing. 

Electronic thermionic valve logic tubes processed up to 650 programming instructions per second, which is not too bad considering this was 73 years ago.

On May 6, 1949, "Machine in operation for the first time," read the handwritten log entry from the University of Cambridge's mathematical laboratory.

Mathematicians and researchers were pleased while analyzing the first results of the programming instructions compiled and completed by the EDSAC computer.

I noted how EDSAC processed data similar to telephone calls of the day being routed using step-by-step electromechanical switching platforms with relays, vacuum tubes, connectors, selectors, and extensive wiring.

"Scientists at Cambridge University are about to unveil a thinking machine with a brain that weighs a ton. It [EDSAC] can do 15,000 arithmetic problems a minute," the St. Louis Missouri Star and Times newspaper reported June 17, 1949.

British Professor Alexander "Sandy" Douglas used the power of the EDSAC computer while writing his thesis on human-computer interaction at the University of Cambridge.

The EDSAC provided real-time results and proved his human-computer interaction thesis findings by successfully executing Douglas's programming code for a simple game whereby a human competed against the computer.

In 1952, Douglas completed the programming for a human-computer game named OXO, which we know as Tic-Tac-Toe.

Sitting at the computer's monitoring desk, the human plays the game using a rotary telephone dial wired into the EDSAC computer. The rotary telephone dial functions as the OXO game controller.

I hear the young folks asking, "What's a rotary telephone dial, grandpa?"

But I digress.

When using Douglas's OXO program, the human user dials a digit on the rotary telephone dial from 1 to 9 to represent where to place an X or O on the tic-tac-toe board shown on a CRT monitor to the right of the rotary telephone dial.

The human player's move appears on the monitor, followed by the computer's response move being instantly displayed.

The computer and the human player take turns placing either an X or an O on the board.

The display screen updated every time the state of the game changed, allowing a player to make their next move until there was a winner.

People in or near the University of Cambridge's mathematical laboratory played the OXO computer game.

Although Douglas created the OXO game for research, it has been acknowledged as one of the first electronic computer games with interaction through a display screen.

Some have also said Douglas's OXO gaming program was one of the first practical uses of artificial computer intelligence.

Douglas's thesis on human-computer interaction was a total success. As a result, he earned a Ph.D. and continued his life-long career in computer science.

To view a screenshot of an EDSAC simulator running the OXO game, go to https://bit.ly/2QLbrh8.

The original EDSAC was decommissioned in 1958, but its webpage is at https://www.tnmoc.org/edsac.

John Maurice Vincent Wilkes was born in Worcestershire, England June 26, 1913. During World War II, while serving in the Royal Air Force, he worked at the Telecommunications Research Establishment. In 2002, he became an emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge.

Wilkes passed away at age 97 Nov. 29, 2010.

Alexander Shafto "Sandy" Douglas, recognized as the creator of the first computer video game program, was born in London, England,  May 21, 1921.

Douglas passed away at age 88 April 29, 2010.

And yes, they died seven months apart on the 29th day of the same year.

I want to end today's Bits and Bytes by thanking David for letting me know he reads my column and that I enjoyed our conversation about computers, programming, and telecommunications.

John Maurice Vincent Wilkes (L) & Bill Renwick (R) in front of the EDSAC

5-hole tape reader and Creed teleprinter

Screenshot of an EDSAC simulator running the OXO game

The EDSAC Computer

A busy year in computing

© Mark Ollig

Reading through the archives, I found a surprising amount of computing news from 40 years ago.

It was 1982. Although it doesn’t seem so long ago, once I stop to think about it being four decades, it is.

In February of 1982, Intel Corporation released the 80286 microprocessor computing chip containing 134,000 transistors and processed coded instructions at a clocking speed or cycles per second rate of 4 to 12 MHz. 

Looking back nearly 51 years, Nov. 15, 1971, the world’s first microprocessor, the Intel 4004, was released. This chip used 2,300 transistors and had a clock speed of 740 kHz.

Later this year, Intel will release its 13th Generation Intel Core i9-13900K Raptor Lake processor, which is said to have a clock speed of up to 5.8 GHz; however, Intel has not revealed the total number of transistors used.

Oct. 1, 1982, the Sony CDP-1-1 became the world’s first commercially-released CD (compact disc) player and sold for $1,000, which today has the same buying power, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, of $3,013.

Billy Joel’s 1978 “52nd Street” music album recording is considered the first to be pressed onto a CD by Sony Music in 1982 with the catalog number 35DP-1.

In the early 1980s, it looked like the start of the compact disc era would replace our vinyl records – which they did for over 20 years.

Cassette tapes were still prevalent during the 1980s and ’90s, while CDs delivered satisfactory digital audio reproduction and provided an easier way to skip (fast track access) to your favorite song. Also, a CD has no tape to break.

Nostalgia for vinyl records began their resurgence in popularity and sales around 2007.

 US vinyl LP record sales in 2021 were 41.7 million, an increase of 51 percent from 2020, according to MRC Data, an industry-recognized provider of music sales information.

I feel the music sounds better – more faithful to its original recording – listening to it from an analog vinyl record rather than a digitized formatted medium.

In 1982, Microsoft’s MS-DOS version 1.25 operating system became available.

Forty years ago, the Hayes Smartmodem 1200 was released. It transmitted data at 1,200 bits per second over standard copper telephone lines. This modem sold for $699, which equals today’s buying power of $2,106.

In 1982, the Commodore 64 (C64) home computer using 8-bit data blocks and 64 KB of memory, went on sale. A total of 17 million C64s were sold.

Approximately 150 new or updated computer models were released in 1982, including:

DEC Rainbow 100,

Sinclair ZX-Spectrum,

Panasonic Quasar HHC,

Franklin Ace 100,

Hewlett-Packard HP-75C,

Heathkit H-100/Zenith Z-100,

Commodore 64,

Toshiba T100,

Epson HX-20, and

GRiD Compass 1101.

You may not have heard of the GriD Compass 1101 computer, but it was one of the first laptops on the market. Grid Systems Corp. manufactured it, and in June 1985, astronaut John Creighton used one aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery during mission STS-51-G.

The lowercase “i” is used in “GriD” because Grid Systems Corp. originally obtained assistance from Intel Corp.

Nov. 1, 1982, Minneapolis Star Tribune featured a full page of columns and articles devoted to home computing in its Marketplace section. One photo shows a person sitting at a desk using the Apple II Plus personal home computer.

The Apple II Plus was manufactured until the end of 1982.

The first 5ESS (class 5 electronic switching system) telephone central office platform was placed into service March 25, 1982, in Seneca, IL. It contains over 100 million lines of computer code. Many of today’s telephone calls are still processed by the 5ESS.

Oct. 21, 1982, The Federal Communications Commission approved AT&T’s plans to construct a “revolutionary portable telephone system.”

By Oct. 1983, Illinois Bell (AT&T’s subsidiary) subscribers in Chicago, IL, had access to the first modern commercial cellular mobile radio system in the United States. 

Coincidently, The 2-pound Motorola DynaTAC 8000X portable cellular mobile phone became commercially available in 1983.

There are debates regarding the date of the first use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) in movies; many attest to its start in 1958.

In 1958, Alfred Hitchcock’s movie “Vertigo” used computer-generated imagery patterns placed onto plastic transparent cellulose (cel) acetate sheets called “animation cels.” The CGI special effect was created using a WWII M5 anti-aircraft guidance and control mechanical analog computer constructed in 1944.

The mechanical analog computer weighed 850 lbs. and contained 11,000 components.

The M5 computer interfaced with a rotating platform with a pendulum hanging above it. The computer-generated effect was created by spinning the pendulum, creating spirograph elements, including the spiral seen inside the person’s eye during the movie’s opening sequence. You can watch it here: https://bit.ly/3ySQFBI.

June 4, 1982, “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” was one of the first theatrical movie films featuring all-CGI and fractal-generated motion-picture filming sequences. These sequences were accomplished using two Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) 32-bit architecture Virtual Address eXtension (VAX) superminicomputers.

Although it was four decades ago, 1982 was a productive and busy year for computing technology and devices.

1982: The personal computer is selected as Time magazine's Man
(or in this case, Machine) of the Year.

The first space station was a ‘brick moon’

© Mark Ollig

On May 14, 1973, NASA launched a modified Saturn V rocket carrying America’s first earth-orbiting space station called Skylab.

Let us pause and travel back 104 years before this launch took place.

In 1869, American author Edward Everett Hale wrote a story about a hand-built artificial moon orbiting the earth with people inside its enclosed sphere (think space station).

“The Brick Moon,” is the title of Hale's fictional account of constructing and launching into earth orbit a 200-foot diameter sphere structure large enough to live in.

Hale's artificial moon needed to be strong, and he chose to construct an enormous sphere of brick.

He reasoned the sphere required hardened material to survive the heat of air friction resulting from its ascent through the atmosphere and into an orbit around the earth.

Protective tiles or “bricks” used on a NASA Space Shuttle absorbed and deflected heat, so his reasoning could be considered futuristic.

“The interior of the Brick Moon is not solid brick, but rather a hollow space through which smaller hollow brick spheres are arrayed and interconnected,” Hale wrote. 

The possibility of placing such a heavy brick sphere into earth orbit was thought impossible at that time due to the absence of a suitable launch platform. 

Looking back, America did launch its first crewed hydrogen gas balloon flight into the sky on Jan. 9, 1793, from Philadelphia, PA.

However, sending an artificial satellite or brick moon into space in 1869 required a different method.

Hale wrote this story before the emergence of modern rocketry, which wouldn't be seen for another 57 years, when, on March 16, 1926, Robert Goddard launched the first liquid-fueled rocket.

Hale needed to devise some clever way to move a large brick moon spherical structure off the ground.

A push would send the round brick moon rolling down a slope towards two massive water-powered flywheels.

These flywheels will have stored enough water pressure energy that once the brick moon comes into contact with the edges of both flywheels, it would roll onto a wooden ramp directed upwards and travel at lightning speed into space.

Hale uses the analogy of a “gigantic peashooter” to describe this method of launching the brick moon high into the sky and with enough speed to travel halfway around the earth so that as it descended, it would rotate (orbit) around the planet forever.

He writes that the brick moon (now a space station) was “nearly the orbit of our original plan, nine thousand miles from the earth's center, five thousand from the surface.”   

As the brick moon orbited the earth in 1869, its thirty-seven-member crew communicated using Morse code telegraphy with people on the ground.

Another famous science fiction writer, Jules Verne, wrote the book “From Earth to the Moon” in 1865. In it, he writes about a projectile (space rocket) with three people aboard, launched from a cannon and landing on the moon.

The Apollo 11 mission landed on the moon 104 years after Verne’s tale about going there.

Verne's cannon launcher was named Columbiad; the Apollo 11 command module was named Columbia. As Verne's did, Apollo 11 had a three-person crew, and both rockets launched from Florida.

Hale and Verne wrote their stories long before anyone had developed a practical means of space travel.

NASA’s Skylab was an 85-ton, 82-foot long (without a command module attached) spacecraft manufactured by McDonnell Douglas from an empty Saturn V rocket third stage.

The Skylab space station was designed for people to live and work in for long periods while orbiting the earth. The living quarters included all the comforts of a three-bedroom home. 

The space station traveled at 17,500 mph, circling the earth every 90 minutes at an average altitude of 272 miles above the planet.

Attached to Skylab were two solar arrays providing 12,400 watts of power.

The NASA website reveals Skylab was equipped with a second command module docking port.

If the existing Skylab crew’s docked command module encountered a major malfunction, “Ah, Houston, we’ve had a problem,” a second Apollo command module spacecraft carrying two astronauts would be launched and come to their rescue. All five astronauts would then return to earth in the second command module.

The first crewed mission to Skylab began on May 25, 1973, with the launch of a Saturn 1B rocket containing astronauts Captain Charles “Pete” Conrad, Jr., Commander Joseph P. Kerwin, and Commander Paul J. Weitz. 

Until Feb. 8, 1974, Skylab was home to nine astronauts from three separate space flight launches.

All nine spent 171 days, 13 hours living there, performing four spacewalks and completing 300 scientific, biomedical, astronomical, and technical projects.

On July 11, 1979, The non-functioning Skylab space station’s orbit decayed and re-entered the earth’s atmosphere, disintegrating and scattering debris in the Indian Ocean and near Perth, Australia.

Edward Everett Hale was born in Boston, MA, on April 3, 1822, and died in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston on June 10, 1909, at 87. 

“The Brick Moon,” written 153 years ago, is the first fictional story of an artificial satellite with a crew onboard orbiting the earth.

Telstar satellite accomplishes a historic first

© Mark Ollig

July 10, 1962, the 90-foot-tall three-stage Thor-Delta rocket lifted off the pad from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Launch Complex 17-B in Florida.

Inside the top of the Thor-Delta rocket’s enclosed payload shroud (fairing) was the Telstar 1 satellite.

Telstar 1 is a 34.5 inches in diameter spherical spacecraft weighing 170 pounds and developed by AT&T’s Bell Laboratories engineers.

This spacecraft became the world’s first communications satellite to transmit live television between the US and Europe.

In 1954, John Robinson Pierce of Bell Telephone Laboratories began researching earth-orbiting satellite repeaters.

The following year, Pierce wrote a book titled “Orbital Radio Relays,” which provided an alternative to copper cable and ground-based microwave radio transmission to relay transoceanic telecommunications between the US and Europe.

In the book, he proposed transmitting and receiving communications between the US and European continents using ground-based radio towers, with the relay path between them (Atlantic Ocean) through earth-orbiting satellites, which provided the vision for future satellite communication projects.

Oct. 4, 1957, a Soviet Union R-7 Semyorka rocket launched the Sputnik 1 satellite into space. It was the first artificial satellite to orbit our planet.

Using a Jupiter-C rocket, the US successfully launched the Explorer 1 satellite and placed it into earth orbit Jan. 31, 1958.

Explorer 1 was the first US satellite to orbit the earth. It was equipped with a cosmic ray detector which discovered strong radiation belts held in space by the earth’s magnetic field. The discovery became known as the Van Allen Radiation Belts.

Aug. 12, 1960, NASA launched an inflated metallic balloon satellite, Echo 1.

Echo 1 was placed into a circular earth orbit of about 1,000 miles. It successfully reflected radio signals from ground-based stations transmitted and received across the US. An audio voice message by President Eisenhower was also relayed using Echo 1.

Echo 1 provided the incentive for building the Telstar satellite.

However, “Telstar involved problems of a scope and magnitude far beyond any we had faced in Echo,” said John Robinson Pierce.

The Telstar communications satellite became the first internationally funded space project.

Bell Telephone Laboratories in the US, the British General Post Office, its French equivalent called Postes Télégraphes et Téléphones, and NASA were behind the project.

The Telstar 1 satellite was equipped with the best technology and electronics available in 1962, including its transmitter and receiver, and strongly resembles how today’s satellites operate.

Telstar 1 was powered by nickel-cadmium batteries which were recharged using 3,600 solar cells surrounding the outer shell of the satellite.

The satellite contained more than 1,000 transistors and other electronic components, including a TWT (traveling-wave tube) capable of amplifying a wide range of radio frequencies.

July 12, 1962, the Telstar 1 satellite relayed the first live trans-Atlantic television broadcast of an American flag flying over the Andover, ME, ground-based receiving station.

This live broadcast was received by ground-based stations in England and France and was seen in other European locations.

The Telstar 1 satellite transmitted a black-and-white television broadcast of the Statue of Liberty, a message from President John F. Kennedy, portions of a baseball game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Chicago Cubs, the Eiffel Tower, and music by French singer Yves Montand.

Large audiences on both sides of the Atlantic watched the first international exchange of live television with amazement.

Telephone calls, facsimile, telephoto images, telegraph messages, and other data between the US and Europe were, for the first time, broadcast in real-time via the Telstar 1 earth-orbiting satellite.

Telstar 1 also relayed to Europe and Britain live television coverage of major news events.

According to NASA’s website, the Telstar 1 satellite “operated until November 1962, when its onboard electronics failed due to the effects of radiation.”

There are stories stating the source of the radiation, and thus the failure of the Telstar 1 satellite resulted from a US-conducted high-altitude nuclear explosion test.

July 9, 1962, a US Thor missile launched from an island 900 miles southwest of Hawaii carried a 1.4 megaton nuclear warhead which detonated 250 miles above our planet (over the Pacific Ocean) in what was known as Starfish Prime.

A related side note: Aug. 5, 1963, the Limited Test Ban Treaty was signed by the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union banning nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere, in outer space, and underwater. It went into effect Oct. 10, 1963.

According to sources, engineers managed to reactivate the Telstar 1 satellite Dec. 10, 1962; intermittent data was obtained from it until Feb. 21, 1963.

“To my mind, satellites came from three sources, from an interest in space engendered by science fiction, from actual space activities, and from an interest in communication,” said John Robinson Pierce in 1980.

John Robinson Pierce was born March 27, 1910, in Des Moines, IA, and passed away at 92 April 2, 2002, in Sunnyvale, CA.

Today, the inactive Telstar 1 satellite is still orbiting our planet with an average apogee (highest point over the globe) of 3,500 miles and a perigee (nearest point to earth) of 590 miles.

July 10, Telstar 1 will reach the milestone of having been in earth orbit for 60 years. After that, it will continue orbiting our planet for another 200 years until the earth’s gravity pulls it back and it burns up in our atmosphere.

To see where the Telstar 1 satellite is, go to: https://bit.ly/3bm8dgd.

On my bookshelf, I display a stamped July 10, 1962, “Communications For Peace” Andover, Maine, envelope commemorating the Project Telstar communications satellite program. Below is a photo I took.

Image capture of the Telstar 1 location from June 30, 2022 at 2:05 PM CST