It Was a Moth!

Since my kids have been old enough to ask, they have wondered "Daddy, what kind of bugs do you have in your computer? Are they spiders! Or beetles! Tee Hee!" :)

Leave it to a thorough entry in the Wikipedia to answer the question. While the term bug has been around since engineers built things (Edison used the term as long ago as 1878), The first computer bug is popularly attributed to a 1947 Relay Calculator being tested at Harvard. You can see the actual bug at the Smithsonian. Here is a picture:So, the answer is "It was a moth!" that actually got stuck in the relay.