The Airy Tape : an early chapter in the history of debugging

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Abstract

This paper describes a recently-found paper tape of an undebugged program written for the EDSAC computer in 1949. It is believed that this program is the first real, 'non-trivial' application ever written for a stored-program computer. An examination of the program sheds new light on the extent to which the debugging problem was unanticipated by early computer programmers, and the motivation for the development of systematic programming practices and debugging aids. the impact of these early developments on programming elsewhere is discussed.

Item Type: Report
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA76 Electronic computers. Computer science. Computer software
Divisions: Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine > Science > Computer Science
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): Debugging in computer science
Series Name: Department of Computer Science Research Report
Publisher: University of Warwick. Department of Computer Science
Place of Publication: Coventry, UK
Official Date: February 1990
Dates:
Date
Event
February 1990
Completion
Number: Number 153
Number of Pages: 25
DOI: CS-RR-153
Institution: University of Warwick
Theses Department: Department of Computer Science
Status: Peer Reviewed
Publication Status: Published
Re-use Statement: M.&nbsp;Campbell-Kelly, &ldquo;The Airy Tape: An Early Chapter on the History of Debugging&rdquo;, <i>Annals of the History of Computing</i> <b>14</b>(4), pp.&nbsp;18-28 (1992)
Related URLs:
URI: https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/60849/

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