The is a picture of the first computer bug. The lady is U.S. Rear Admiral Dr. Grace Murray Hopper, who worked with Howard Aiken from 1944 and used his machine for gunnery and ballistics calculation for the US Bureau of Ordnance’s Computation project. One day, the program she was running gave incorrect results and, upon examination, a moth was found blocking one of the relays. The bug was removed and the program performed to perfection. Since then, a program error in a computer has been called a bug, even though it would take a mighty tiny bug to interfere with the workings of a modern microscopic microprocessor.

Nancy Head has contributed the following additional information about Dr. Hopper:

Dr. Hopper greatly simplified programming through the COBOL language which was the first programming language to allow the use of regular English for variable names and logical operations. She also introduced the concept and standardization of "compilers“, now a standard feature of programming languages. The compiler translates the programmer’s code into machine language, thus sparing the programmer the onerous task of doing it it herself. This contributed to business use of computers and modern data processing because regular businesspersons and scientists (not just mathematicians and computer scientists) could learn to program computers.

More about her life and software engineering contributions can be found at http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/hopper.html and http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/tap/Files/hopper-story.html.

Some fun/interesting quotes from her can be found at http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/tap/Files/hopper-wit.html.