3 ms·
The Therac-25 story is pretty wild, especially as it was a reuse (with modification) of an existing codebase, but for cost savings the -25 was designed without
by masklinn 3y ago
The Therac-25 story is pretty wild, especially as it was a reuse (with modification) of an existing codebase, but for cost savings the -25 was designed without hardware interlocks, under the assumption that the software would run fine, as it had run fine on the -20.
Turns out the software had run fine on the -6 -20 because of the mechanical interlocks which prevented it from critically fucking up, but there was no reporting built into the software interlocks, so no way to know when they'd triggered. And that was before additional modifications were added for the -25.
- anonymousiam 3y agoNot all that different from the Ariane-5 maiden launch, except for human lives being at stake vs. billions of Euros (adjusted for inflation). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_flight_V88 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_flight_V88
- nirui 3y agoWell, for me, the level of anxiety is definitely different. I somehow have a few degrees of fear towards machines that could emit harmful level of ionizing radiation, and I can be nervous if the machine is operating on me (say doing X-Ray at the dentist). Plus, I also have some anxiety when handling concurrent programming, which according to the Wikipedia is what caused the error in Therac-25. So I guess I got double anxieties on that story.