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About this guide
Bugs is a field guide to specimens collected from the history of computing. Each entry is illustrated, dated, taxonomized, and described in the voice of someone who finds the particular causes interesting and the consequences instructive. The project takes its visual cue from naturalist field guides, which is the form best suited to things that are at once technical, peculiar, and worth a closer look.
The catalog grows when a specimen earns its page. There is no fixed count, no target number. A bug enters the guide when there is a clean story to tell about it and a diagram worth drawing.
The selection is curatorial. The criteria, loosely held: the bug had to be real and well-documented; the cause had to be specific and explicable in a paragraph; the consequences had to be either instructive, funny, or both. Aerospace tragedies sit next to PostScript printing failures. A moth sits next to a missing overbar. I did not attempt to be comprehensive. I attempted to be good.
Each diagram is drawn from scratch as inline SVG. Nothing is generated, nothing is borrowed. The illustrations exist because the bug stories are usually told without them, and a good drawing is occasionally more honest than a paragraph.
Sources for every claim are linked at the foot of each entry. If you find an error, the repository is on GitHub and pull requests are welcome, though the catalog itself is curated rather than open.
Compiled and illustrated in 2026 by Mario A. Ruiz.