Digital Fortress

by Dan Brown

It came from the world’s first computer—the Mark 1—a room-size maze of electromechanical circuits built in 1944 in a lab at Harvard University. The computer developed a glitch one day, and no one was able to locate the cause. After hours of searching, a lab assistant finally spotted the problem. It seemed a moth had landed on one of the computer’s circuit boards and shorted it out. From that moment on, computer glitches were referred to as bugs.

During the Renaissance, Spanish sculptors who made mistakes while carving expensive marble often patched their flaws with cera—“wax.” A statue that had no flaws and required no patching was hailed as a “sculpture sin cera” or a “sculpture without wax.” The phrase eventually came to mean anything honest or true. The English word “sincere” evolved from the Spanish sin cera—“without wax.” David’s secret code was no great mystery—he was simply signing his letters “Sincerely.”