Have a look at this Picture:
That is a page from a log book kept by Grace Hopper while working on a Mark II Computer at Harvard University in 1947. It is the first officially recorded use of the term "Debugging"
Some research into Ms. Hopper shows that she was very instrumental in the devlopment of computer programming as we know it today. She wrote the first real complier, taking us from simple numeric operations on the computer to the ability to write structured programs. Her work on the language FLOW-MATIC evloved into what we know as COLBOL.
She was a Rear Admiral at the time of her death, and gave many lectures on computing... its truly a facinating study.
See her wikipedia page here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_hopper
And as always, a video is most appropriate. Here Ms. Hopper discusses the distance light traves in one nanosecond: