March 1, 1976 Because Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were going into business, they needed a name for their company. According to Wozniak, it was Jobs who thought up the name for their new computer company one afternoon as the two drove along Highway 85 between Palo Alto and Los Altos.

American engineers have been calling small flaws in machines “bugs” for over a century. Thomas Edison talked about bugs in electrical circuits in the 1870s. When the first computers were built during the early 1940s, people working on them found bugs in both the hardware of the machines and in the programs that ran them.

In 1947, engineers working on the Mark II computer at Harvard University found a moth stuck in one of the components. They taped the insect in their logbook and labeled it “first actual case of bug being found.” The words “bug” and “debug” soon became a standard part of the language of computer programmers.