Fergie's Tech Blog

Wired: History's Worst Software Bugs

Simon Garfinkel writes in Wired News:

Last month automaker Toyota announced a recall of 160,000 of its Prius hybrid vehicles following reports of vehicle warning lights illuminating for no reason, and cars' gasoline engines stalling unexpectedly. But unlike the large-scale auto recalls of years past, the root of the Prius issue wasn't a hardware problem -- it was a programming error in the smart car's embedded code. The Prius had a software bug.

With that recall, the Pruis joined the ranks of the buggy computer -- a club that began in 1947 when engineers found a moth in Panel F, Relay #70 of the Harvard Mark 1 system. The computer was running a test of its multiplier and adder when the engineers noticed something was wrong. The moth was trapped, removed and taped into the computer's logbook with the words: "first actual case of a bug being found."

Among the worst software bugs, Wired describes these outstanding moments in haywired software history:

• July 28, 1962 -- Mariner I space probe.
• 1982 -- Soviet gas pipeline.
• 1985-1987 -- Therac-25 medical accelerator.
• 1988 -- Buffer overflow in Berkeley Unix finger daemon (Morris Worm).
• 1988-1996 -- Kerberos Random Number Generator.
• January 15, 1990 -- AT&T Network Outage.
• 1993 -- Intel Pentium floating point divide.
• 1995/1996 -- The Ping of Death.
• June 4, 1996 -- Ariane 5 Flight 501.
• November 2000 -- National Cancer Institute, Panama City.

posted by Fergie @ 11/08/2005 06:30:00 AM