The Big Technical Mistakes of History

An anonymous reader tips a PC Authority review of some of the biggest technical goofs of all time. "As any computer programmer will tell you, some of the most confusing and complex issues can stem from the simplest of errors. This article looking back at history's big technical mistakes includes some interesting trivia, such as NASA's failure to convert measurements to metric, resulting in the Mars Climate Orbiter being torn apart by the Martian atmosphere. Then there is the infamous Intel Pentium floating point fiasco, which cost the company $450m in direct costs, a battering on the world's stock exchanges, and a huge black mark on its reputation. Also on the list is Iridium, the global satellite phone network that promised to make phones work anywhere on the planet, but required 77 satellites to be launched into space."

Therac-25

[alanw]

Don't forget the Therac-25 [wikipedia.org]

Poor software design and development led to radiation overdoses for 6 patients being treated for cancer, with 3 dying as a direct result.

Sadly, mistakes still keep on happening [bbc.co.uk].

Re:Microsoft...

[WrongSizeGlass]

Bob. :)

Let's not forget Apple's "Lisa". I know the Apple III was in the list but the Lisa cost more to develop and probably sold less units. I know a lot of the Mac UI came from Lisa underpinnings but the "Epic Fail" tag is deserved.

Disclaimer: Apple user for 20 years.

Re:Digital watches.

[MichaelSmith]

I have a great digital watch. The band is integral with the body of the watch so I can wear it in bed and it won't catch on anything. It has up and down timers, world clock and multiple alarms. It cost 30 bucks on line.

I wear it when travelling. I use the stopwatch to time my medication and the world clock to schedule calls home. It does things which no mechanical watch can do.

Re:Digital watches.

[Shin-LaC]

That the world is round has been known since antiquity. "The world is flat" is sort of a meta-myth: a mythical belief that people used to believe a myth, when in fact they didn't.

Re:Iridium?

[swilver]

Latency with satellite communication would make this an annoying way of having a phone conversation. I wouldn't like it.

Re:Of all time?!?

[stjobe]

That's the Tacoma Narrows bridge [wikipedia.org]. And it wasn't a mere breeze, it was a 40 mph wind, i.e. a gale on the Beaufort scale [wikipedia.org].

Apart from that, I agree.

Re:Iridium?

[Troed]

You're probably having it quite often without even knowing it. Latency to low-earth isn't the same as geostationary.

Re:Human History has more than 10 years

[DNS-and-BIND]

Way to have half a piece of information. The French had a plan - advance into Belgium and meet the Germans head-on. Who could have guessed that the Germans would pass through impassable terrain and precisely hit the single weak point between the strong Maginot Line and the first-string armies in Belgium?

Patriot Missile

[Bakkster]

Yeah, I would immediately classify any error that caused deaths to be more important.

Another interesting case was the Patriot Missile failure [umn.edu]. The system clock counted in 1/10th second increments. However, it added 0.1 to a floating point number. Unfortunately, 0.1 in binary is a repeating number, similar to 1/3rd in binary being 0.333333333...

So, ten times every second the time drifted just the tiniest bit. The missile that missed had been running for days, so its clock was one third of a second off, and a Scud travels a long way during that time.

Let that be a lesson to all of you: use an integer counter, and divide by 10 to get the time in seconds.

Re:Iridium?

[dnsdude]

I have an Iridium phone (the original Motorola 9500). Not only does it work flawlessly (as long as you're outdoors...), it only uses 66 active LEOs. They vastly underestimated the number of people who want/need one, but it's the only (handheld) phone system in the world that works *everywhere* in the world: North pole, south pole, everywhere.

The only "flaw" (besides the multi-billion-dollar goof in estimating the market size), was the name: They knew they really only needed 66 satellites, but who's going to name a company after that wacky Lanthanoid "dysprosium"? Nobody, that's who.

Footnote: Globalstar (the only other publicly-offered, LEO-based satphone system) also went bankrupt. But they also have resurrected, and have a larger customer base than Iridium, despite vastly smaller world coverage (in part because of cheaper handsets and air time).

HP-35

[SteveWoz]

HP-35 calculator 2.02 log/antilog problem.

Not big in a disaster sense but noteworthy.

Re:There is no way NASA mixed the measurement syst

[Bragador]

To quote Wikipedia:

The metric/imperial mix-up that destroyed the craft was caused by a human error in the software development, back on Earth. The thrusters on the spacecraft, which were intended to control its rate of rotation, were controlled by a computer that underestimated the effect of the thrusters by a factor of 4.45. This is the ratio between a pound force–the standard unit of force in the imperial system–and a newton, the standard unit in the metric system. The software was working in pounds force, while the spacecraft expected figures in newtons; 1 pound force equals approximately 4.45 newtons.

The software had been adapted from use on the earlier Mars Climate Orbiter, and was not adequately tested before launch. The navigation data provided by this software was also not cross-checked while in flight. The Mars Climate Orbiter thus drifted off course during its voyage and entered a much lower orbit than planned, and was destroyed by atmospheric friction.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter [wikipedia.org]

Re:The article is right about FDIV

[eulernet]

One-in-a-few-billion problem ?

At that time, I was programming a network game about trucks, and when when replaying a demo on the network, the players desynchronized after a few minutes.

I spent a lot of time looking into the logs, and discovered that there was a floating point error that desynchronized the trucks.
I still believe that the FDIV bug was much more frequent than publicized, and it had more impact than what Intel originally described.

Intel released a software patch to Watcom C++ library, but the patch was terrible, with the FDIV replaced with a lot of instructions just to detect the cases where the bug might appear, and use shiftings instead of FDIV.

I think that the bug was much publicized because it was the beginning of Internet, where a lot of new information went unfiltered, and Intel completely missed their communication on this bug discovered by Thomas Nicely.
Here is the whole story behind this bug:
http://www.trnicely.net/pentbug/pentbug.html [trnicely.net]

Re:Iridium?

[dnsdude]

>Um. Iridium didn't actually work that well at all. Perhaps you missed my post. It works flawlessly. It was never going to compete with cell phones, nor was it designed to. It works where cell phones *don't*, not where they already do. Tall buildings? Why would you need a satellite phone if you're near a tall building? Your cell phone doesn't work in the middle of the desert (technical flaw?). Nor in the middle of the Sargasso Sea. Nor in most of the places in the Pacific Ocean. My Iridium phone does.

Unix

[ka9dgx]

The biggest failure to date which didn't get mentioned is Unix. If we had Multics, with it's B2 security rating, we might have actually had secure operating systems in the hands of the public at this point in time. We wouldn't be dealing with spam, or virii.

But no..... it was soooooo complicated.... K&R had to stick us with a piece of insecure crap... and everyone else was stupid enough to copy it.

Re:The article is right about FDIV

[Anonymous Coward]

The only problem with that rumor is that its rumor and unsubstantiated. Let me clear up the confusion around this since I was actually working for Intel in the desktop processor division when this happened and I have first hand knowledge.

The problem was independently reported and acknowledged by Intel in the same month. There were a few weeks of delay while the problem was recreated and evaluated internally. The big itself would affect only certain calculations that only scientists and mathematicians would encounter, and only a small percentage of those users. It had zero effect on on every day users. Intel offered immediately to replace any processor for anyone who might legitimately be affected by the problem. Everyone freaked out and wanted a new one even though it would never be a problem for them and replacing desktop cpu's isnt exactly easy for the average home user. Intel relented and said anyone could have one if they wanted it. An extremely small number of people actually asked for a replacement chip.

There is no truth in the rumor that Intel knew about the problem significantly prior to the discovery by Nicely. Intel regularly finds and reports extensive errata on its products and does not withhold information from customers.

It seems that outrage is easy, especially when you dont know what you're demanding or why. But its pretty lame when people run around freaking out, cost a company a half billion dollars, and then when their outrage is expended, dont even want the thing they shrieked about.

The popular media and industry "experts" made a mountain out of a molehill, and then covered their backsides by painting a reasonable company as being contemptuous of their customers.

So in summary, the FDIV situation wasnt even one of the top 100,000,000 biggest technical mistakes, nor was it even a case of the company mishandling the situation. It was a major instance of the press getting out of hand and whipping the public into a frenzy for absolutely nothing.