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."

they forgot the black marker

[cobbaut]

They forgot the cd protection cracked with a black marker...
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/1069/black_marker_cracks_cd_protection/ [zeropaid.com]

IBM PS/2

[Kjella]

I had some of those growing up and it wasn't really an engineering failure, it was a mentality failure. IBM didn't built PCs, they built tanks. Their keyboards are infamous and still equally usable today 20 years later as when they were new.

That was equally much the case with the rest of their PCs, using very high quality equipment operated under very less than ideal random home/office conditions and with very much consumer software of consumer quality, not server quality. In short, it made no sense.

The result was that IBM priced themselves way out of the market of cheaper clones. It was cheaper and better to buy a clone, throw it out if it failed and buy another. You just don't do that with big iron or servers, but with desktops hell yeah.

Like the article said, it wasn't more of a failure than that PS/2 ports become the dominating keyboard/mouse connector. If there was every a silly move by IBM there it was giving away the software market to Microsoft, but the average desktop market was doomed long before the PS/2.

Hubble telescope, anyone?

[Errol backfiring]

The technical error here was that there was no test on the real thing. The company that made a part of the telescope had only a separate testbed that was made to specifications. Alas, these specifications were exactly one inch misunderstood, so the result was a part that was incredibly accurately one inch out of position.

Re:Iridium?

[koiransuklaa]

The really early cell phones were the size of briefcases, so heavy that you needed a separate handset part -- I guess calling them "mobile" would be a bit too much. See the (Nokia) Mobira Talkman 450 [about-nokia.com] in all its beauty...

I remember my dad buying one and us being pretty damn impressed when it actually worked at the summer cottage in the middle of the forest. We had to lug the damn thing to the roof to get a signal, but it did work.

Re:Microsoft...

[arth1]

Speaking of technical flaws and Lisa... You could plop the boot drive into the Dumpster, and it would format it. The tech savvy devs who designed the "drag-to-trash = format" function never imagined that users would be stupid enough to do something like that! Little did they know about how giving someone a mouse transforms them from someone who can use a line based editor to set up printer drivers and networking into the horror that is a modern user.

I'm lost

[WinstonWolfIT]

Where's Microsoft Bob? Novell Groupwise? Lotus Word Pro? Lantastic?

Digital watches.

[dangitman]

"Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea." - Douglas Adams.

There's that, and there's also the whole "the world is flat" and "disease is caused by imbalances in the four humours of the body" ideas. The article's examples seem pretty trivial in comparison.

OMG Internet BBS

[arielCo]

The virus is thought to have been developed in 1986 by two brothers in Pakistan named Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi, who were looking to protect some medical software they had written from disc copying. They had found some suitable code on an internet bulletin board site and adapted it so that if someone used the software then the malware would be installed.

I'm guessing "Iain Thomson" is not a day over 25, not very versed on the history of the Internet, and too busy to look up the meaning of "BBS". Am I right?

Re:Human History has more than 10 years

[brufleth]

Reading that article it sounds like the technical mistake wasn't really a mistake but the reality of the Germans hitting the most well defended spot with a creative attack that effectively countered the defense design. That's more of a lack of guessing what the future would bring. The line was effective against what it was built for.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

Unix [...] K&R

Further evidence that a five-digit Slashdot ID does not a geek make.

Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie created C.
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie created Unix.

Your parents created a dumbass.