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Research Report CS-RR-153

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M. Campbell-Kelly, The Airy Tape An Early Chapter in the History of Debugging (February 1, 1990).

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.

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M. Campbell-Kelly, "The Airy Tape: An Early Chapter on the History of Debugging", Annals of the History of Computing 14(4), pp. 18-28 (1992)

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