The Big Technical Mistakes of History 244
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by
kdawson
from the seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time dept.
from the seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time dept.
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."
What no Windows Vista? (Score:5, Insightful)
Rim shot...!
Iridium? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pound has dimensions [M][L]/[T]2 and [M] ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Iridium? (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, the first cellular mobile phones were as big as a brick as well; I wouldn't say that this was a "technical error", again, it's a failure of marketing to recognize that they wouldn't sell.
And even the phone wasn't the biggest problem; the problem was the huge cost to make a phonecall... it was simply prohibitive. Had it been reasonably cheap, I'm sure there woulb've been plenty of uses (if only for enabling people in isolate places, adventurers, ship & oil platform crew etc. to communicate).
Human History has more than 10 years (Score:5, Insightful)
When I saw the title, I immediately imagined the Maginot line [wikipedia.org]. Thousands more examples could come to mind.
Could somebody please explain to the author of the articles that Technology is more than computers/gadjets and older than 10 years? It is an epic history that goes along with mankind.
Re:Iridium? (Score:5, Insightful)
Capacitor Plague? (Score:5, Insightful)
What, no Capacitor Plague? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague [wikipedia.org]
Re:IBM PS/2 (Score:3, Insightful)
Have to disagree to a point. The PS/2 range sold big time in the business/corporate and education worlds (at least in the UK until RM/Viglen got their toe in the door). Built like tanks, yes - but they were very reliable in my experience.
The biggest failing within the PS/2 world was the licencing arrangements for the MCA (microchannel architecture) bus which made it expensive for other manufacturers to use and so few did. MCA was technically great, but the way IBM brought it to market ended up with is getting the EISA bus and the goddam awful VESA Local Bus (VLB), whose cards were so long that they frequently popped out of their connectors if the motherboard was flexed or warped due to heat and poor mounting. I recall that one quick fix for VESA problems was to roll the empty tube of a plastic Bic pen under the back edge of a warping motherboard to stop it drooping too much.
Of all time?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, we have got to stop with the hyperbole before our children don't know the difference between a War on Drugs and a War in Iraq.
We we say of all time, I think of things like lead plumbing in Rome, or the suspension bridge that got tore apart by a mere breeze.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning#History [wikipedia.org]
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3932185696812733207# [google.com]
Re:The article is right about FDIV (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem Intel had with the FDIV bug was one of PR. The Pentium range was the first CPU family to be directly marketed to the general public in a big way.
While anyone with knowledge of the chip design and production processes understood that such bugs are not particularly uncommon (many much simpler chips have well documented errata and workarounds for unintentional behaviour, like the 286's "gate A20" bug that actually turned out to be useful) the general public and the popular press had no such understanding so were very surprised - they assumed that all CPUs were (or should be) completely 100% perfect and therefore taking issue with what they saw as being sold defective goods.
Before the first generation Pentium FDIV issue, such relatively minor problems were dealt with by the error, including any extra side-effects and possible workarounds, being documented, those errata being sent to the chip makers customers and relevant software developers, and things would get patched up without the general public ever being aware there was an issue in the first place aside perhaps from a small number of users who by shear chance were noticeably affected by the one-in-a-few-billion problem before their software was patched (those people would be given replacement chips and/or other recompense). A costly replacement program simply wouldn't have been needed in this case.
Re:Human History has more than 10 years (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope - the Maginot Line did *exactly* what it said on the tin: persuaded the Germans to avoid a frontal assault on France & invade Belgium instead.
The problem was that the strategy didn't think through the next move, which is that the Germans would continue into France via Belgium.
Re:Iridium? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:There is no way NASA mixed the measurement syst (Score:2, Insightful)
One lesson though: Always use metric in science stuff. Understood NASA?
Dont forget Spam! (Score:1, Insightful)
The quirkiness of the 8086 affected all of us. (Score:5, Insightful)
Just before the time of the introduction of the 8086 I knew a chief of technology of a high-tech company who was waiting for the 8086 as though it were a combination of Christmas, his birthday, and the birth of his child. He would start every conversation by telling everyone Intel's release date for the 8086.
The day of its release, he was miserably unhappy. Intel chose to continue an architecture that made assembly language programming and debugging of high-level languages more difficult.
Wikipedia says about the 8086 [wikipedia.org]: "Marketed as source compatible, the 8086 was designed so that assembly language for the 8008, 8080, or 8085 could be automatically converted into equivalent (sub-optimal) 8086 source code, with little or no hand-editing. The programming model and instruction set was (loosely) based on the 8080 in order to make this possible. However, the 8086 design was expanded to support full 16-bit processing, instead of the fairly basic 16-bit capabilities of the 8080/8085."
The problem was that the quirkiness has been extended to the 32-bit processors of today. The Wikipedia article says, "The legacy of the 8086 is enduring in the basic instruction set of today's personal computers and servers..."
And, "Programming over 64 KB boundaries involved adjusting segment registers
Everyone on the planet who used or were affected by computers then suffered because the debugging was much more complicated than if Intel had chosen to make the operation of the 8086 simpler.
"Such relatively simple and low-power 8086-compatible processors in CMOS are still used in embedded systems."
Re:Human History has more than 10 years (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:OMG Internet BBS (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Human History has more than 10 years (Score:4, Insightful)
Maginot was built to fight WWI technology and tactics. ...and today, we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a navy which is ideally suited to win world war two. A carrier can be sunk with missiles that cost vastly less than even one of its fighter planes.
-jcr
Re:The article is right about FDIV (Score:4, Insightful)
Though wasn't the issue in case of Pentium FDIV bug specifically that Intel didn't publish the errata or...any other information after Intel researchers discovered the error? It took one independent one, to whom Intel didn't even respond initially...
Re:Of all time?!? (Score:4, Insightful)
People always like to attach more value to events in their times than is due...
Re:I nominate... (Score:3, Insightful)
Close, but the real problem is the electoral college that pretty much ensures that any vote NOT for one of the two major-party candidates is a wasted vote.
We don't technically have a two-party system, we have an election system that is rigged such that only two of the parties count.
Re:Human History has more than 10 years (Score:5, Insightful)
Who could have guessed that the $enemy would pass through impassable terrain and precisely hit the single weak point
Someday maybe we’ll stop falling for that one.
Just kidding.
Re:Human History has more than 10 years (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
The Germans, it seems, had no trouble guessing it at all.
The article has the metric mix-up mixed up (Score:3, Insightful)
FTFA:
It turned out that while most of the programming and mission planning had been done in units of measurement from the Imperial system used in the US, the software to control the orbiter's thrusters had been written with units of measurement from the metric system.
And that is WRONG! It was the software that had the archaic units, and the rest of the spaceship was built with international units.
The software was working in pounds force, while the spacecraft expected figures in newtons; [wikipedia.org] 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.
I did not read the rest of that article, since they're not fact-checking their mocking of people's inability to double-check things.
Re:Iridium? (Score:2, Insightful)
No, it's not. Iridium LEOs are 485 mi high, GEOs are 22,236 mi high. That's 46 hops, which Iridium doesn't do. Even with per-satellite latency, you're nowhere near GEO delay.
I used to own an Inmarsat phone, which uses GEOs. There's simply no comparison. The Inmarsat phone is in a little briefcase, and the lid is the antenna (which must be aimed at the GEO). By comparison to my (admittedly large) Moto 9500, it's like, uh, carrying a briefcase. And it doesn't work above 80 degrees latitude.
Slashdotters think that if it doesn't fit in your ear like some Zoolander phone, it's not a breakthrough. With Iridium, I can talk to anyone, from anywhere, any time. I consider that a breakthrough.
Don't forget religion. (Score:1, Insightful)
Believing in some unseen entity who supposedly created existence, and basing all societal calculations on that. That has to be the mother of all errors.
Re:Iridium? (Score:3, Insightful)
Even with per-satellite latency, you're nowhere near GEO delay.
You can get close to the flight-time delay of geo (250ms or so) if you include enough instances of per-node transmission time in your back-of-the-envelope calculations. Each node requires a non-zero amount of time to transmit its packet of data to the next hop. For a geostationary, that's a single fixed chunk of latency. (Only one hop). For Iridium et al, that's once per lateral hop. And Inmarsat BGAN has pretty good throughput: 64kbps. Iridium, OTOH, seems to run at best 10 kbps, so each Iridium hop can potentially have more than six times the per-packet per-hop latency.
However, an Air Force Institute of Technology study [dtic.mil] seems to indicate that simulated Iridium end-to-end latency works out, on average, to 178 ms, so it would seem a bit more responsive than Inmarsat. In fact, this AFIT paper [isel.ipl.pt], top of Page 8, indicates that it'd take 14 LEOsat hops to get end-to-end latency comparable to geostationary distance-based delays. So those clever folks at Iridium seem to have found some good optimizations.
All of that said, I agree, Iridium was pure genius. Technically. From the business plan perspective, not so much. But I'm sure the Department of Defense is glad for final outcome. For low-bandwidth data, Iridium modems are simply brilliant. Great way to, for instance, collect data from isolated weather observation systems and pipe them back to the big meteorology centers for analysis and numerical forecasting.
Re:Human History has more than 10 years (Score:4, Insightful)
So how do you protect against a missile?
Anti-missile systems, of course. We have those, and we're working on better ones.
But what you fail to realize is that carriers are for a lot more than just planes landing and taking off from the water. Carriers are the modern US military's pack mules: if something is going from A to B and not by C130 or similarly large aircraft, it's going by ship. If it's going by ship, that probably means it's on a carrier.
Food, water, ammunition, gear, and various other supplies travel on carriers. The things have weeks if not months of supplies for their fleet in reserve, as well as excess for things like emergencies (see: hurricane/tsunami relief). They are self-contained international emergency response units and, aside from wielding immense military power, are the biggest thing keeping the teeth in the US military's international and sea presence.
A city can be destroyed by a missile that costs less than what a single city skyscraper would cost, but that doesn't (necessarily) make cities an antiquation.
Re:The quirkiness of the 8086 affected all of us. (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, that and the 68000 just being a really good chip in its own right. Motorola were smart enough to stick to flat memory architectures, and it had a really nice, obvious instruction set, and was powerful to boot.
Re:Of all time?!? (Score:4, Insightful)
Those weren't mistakes per se. Rome's lead problem was due to a lack of knowledge about the effects of lead. You can't blame people who don't consider information that is not known to mankind at the time.
Galloping Gertie was an unfortunate situation, but since there were no tools to do dynamic modeling at the time, it wasn't quite a mistake.
Therac-25 was a mistake. The dangers were known, the problem was well defined. All the information was there to make the right choices and we knew how to make appropriately safe software at the time.