TuringDrop & WildernessWanderer
Hey, I was looking at that old photo of Grace Hopper’s moth on the logbook, and I kept thinking: how many tiny glitches, like that moth, actually changed the whole course of computing? I’d love to hear your take on those little moments that slip under the radar.
Ah, the humble moth—an accidental glitch that earned its own name. Think of it as a tiny glitch, a single miswired transistor, a stray keystroke, or a forgotten semicolon, and suddenly a whole lineage of technology shifts. Take the 1957 incident on the IBM 704 where a simple misread of a punched card caused the machine to miscalculate and the entire batch of printed reports was lost. The engineers had to re‑type everything, and that forced IBM to double‑check card reading logic, leading to a more robust input system that we take for granted today. Or recall the 1976 “bugs” that caused the Apollo Guidance Computer to mis‑interpret a sensor reading; the astronauts had to manually correct it, and that incident spurred the first formal quality‑assurance protocols in mission‑critical software. And let’s not forget the 1991 “CVE‑1991‑0104” typo in a network stack that, when exploited, let attackers pivot into corporate servers—an early lesson that led to the modern patching ecosystem. Every one of these little slip‑ups taught a hard lesson: the smallest oversight can ripple into a paradigm shift, and the history books love to remember the ones that got the name of a creature or a typo, but the silent ones, the ones that slipped under the radar, are what truly reshape the field.