FAMOUS BUGS
Source: http://www.cnet.com/Content/Features/Dlife/Bugs
A probe launched from Cape Canaveral was set to go to Venus. After takeoff, the unmanned rocket carrying the probe went off course, and NASA had to blow up the rocket to avoid endangering lives on earth. NASA later attributed the error to a faulty line of Fortran code. The report stated, "Somehow a hyphen had been dropped from the guidance program loaded aboard the computer, allowing the flawed signals to command the rocket to veer left and nose down...Suffice it to say, the first U.S. attempt at interplanetary flight failed for want of a hyphen." The vehicle cost more than $80 million, prompting Arthur C. Clarke to refer to the mission as "The most expensive hyphen in history."
BUG 9: Radiation machine kills four: 1985 to 1987
Faulty software in a Therac-25 radiation-treatment machine made by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) resulted in several cancer patients receiving lethal overdoses of radiation. Four patients died. When their families sued, all the cases were settled out of court. A later investigation by independent scientists Nancy Leveson and Clark Turner found that accidents occurred even after AECL thought it had fixed particular bugs. "A lesson to be learned from the Therac-25 story is that focusing on particular software bugs is not the way to make a safe system," they wrote in their report. "The basic mistakes here involved poor software-engineering practices and building a machine that relies on the software for safe operation."
BUG 8: AT&T long distance service fails: 1990
Switching errors in AT&T's call-handling computers caused the company's long-distance network to go down for nine hours, the worst of several telephone outages in the history of the system. The meltdown affected thousands of services and was eventually traced to a single faulty line of code.
BUG 7: Patriot missile misses: 1991
The U.S. Patriot missile's battery successfully headed off many Iraqi Scuds during the Gulf War. But the system also failed to track several incoming Scud missiles, including one that killed 28 U.S. soldiers in a barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The problem stemmed from a software error that put the tracking system off by 0.34 of a second.
As Ivars Peterson states in Fatal Defect, the system was originally supposed to be operated for only 14 hours at a time. In the Dhahran attack, the missile battery had been on for 100 hours. This meant that the errors in the system's clock accumulated to the point that the tracking system no longer functioned. The military had in fact already found the problem but hadn't sent the fix in time to prevent the barracks explosion.
BUG 6: Pentium chip fails math test: 1994
The concept of bugs entered the mainstream when Professor Thomas Nicely at Lynchburg College in Virginia discovered that the Pentium chip gave incorrect answers to certain complex equations. In fact, the bug occurred rarely and affected only a tiny percentage of Intel's customers.
The real problem was the nonchalant way Intel reacted. "Because we had been marketing the Pentium brand heavily, there was a bigger brand awareness," says Richard Dracott, Intel director of marketing. "We didn't realize how many people would know about it, and some people were outraged when we said it was no big deal."
Intel eventually offered to replace the affected chips, which Dracott says cost the company $450 million. To prove that it had learned from its mistake, Intel then started publishing a list of known "errata," or bugs, for all of its chips.
BUG 5: Intuit's MacInTax leaks financial secrets: 1995
Intuit's tax software for Windows and Macintosh has suffered a series of bugs, including several that prompted the company to pledge to pay any resulting penalties and interest.
The scariest bug was discovered in March 1995: the code included in a MacInTax debug file allowed Unix users to log in to Intuit's master computer, where all MacInTax returns were stored. From there, the user could modify or delete returns.
Intuit later ended up winning BugNet's annual bug-fix award in 1996 by responding to bugs faster than any other major vendor.
BUG 4: New Denver airport misses its opening: 1995
The Denver International Airport was intended to be a state-of-the-art airport, with a complex, computerized baggage-handling system and 5,300 miles of fiber-optic cabling.
Unfortunately, bugs in the baggage system caused suitcases to be chewed up and drove automated baggage carts into walls. The airport eventually opened 16 months late, $3.2 billion over budget, and with a mainly manual baggage system.
BUG 3: Java opens security holes; browsers simply crash: 1996 to 1997
All right, this is not a single bug but a veritable bug collection. We include this entry because the sheer quantity of press coverage about bugs in Sun's Java and the two major browsers has had a profound affect on how the average consumer perceives the Internet. The conglomeration of headlines probably set back the e-commerce industry by five years.
Java's problems surfaced in 1996, when research at the University of Washington and Princeton began to uncover a series of security holes in Java that could, theoretically, allow hackers to download personal information from someone's home PC. To date, no one has reported a real case of a hacker exploiting the flaw, but knowing that the possibility existed prompted several companies to instruct employees to disable Java in their browsers.
Meanwhile, Netscape and Microsoft began battling in earnest in the much-publicized browser wars. That competition inspired both companies to accelerate the schedules for their 4.0 releases, and the result has been a swarm of bugs, ranging from JavaScript flaws in Netscape's Communicator to a reboot bug in Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
Communicator is now in Version 4.04 for Windows 95 and Windows NT, six months after its first release. Internet Explorer 4.01, the first of presumably many bug-fix versions, arrived in December, two months after the initial release of IE 4.0.
BUG 2: Deregulation of California utilities has to wait: 1998
Two new electrical power agencies charged with deregulating the California power industry have postponed their plans by at least three months. The delay will let them debug the software that runs the new power grid.
Consumers and businesses were supposed to be able to choose from some 200 power suppliers as of January 1, 1998, but time ran out for properly testing the communications system that links the two new agencies with the power companies.
The project was postponed after a seven-day simulation of the new system revealed serious problems. The delay may cost as much as $90 million -- much of which may eventually be footed by ratepayers, and which may cause some of the new power suppliers to go into debt or out of business before they even start.
BUG 1: The millennium bug: 2000
For a long time, programmers have saved memory space by leaving only two numeric fields for the year instead of four: 87 instead of 1987, for example. When clocks strike midnight on January 1, 2000, this programming shorthand will make millions of computers worldwide think it's 1900, if their software isn't fixed before then.
The so-called year 2000 (Y2K) bug has given birth to a cottage industry of consultants and programming tools dedicated to making sure the modern world doesn't come to a screeching halt on the first day of the next century. Some say that the bug will cause airplanes to fall from the sky, ATMs to shut down, and Social Security checks to bounce.
At the very least, the bug is a huge and expensive logistical problem, although most vital organizations now say they will have fixed the critical portions of their systems in time.
BUG 1: The real live bug
My "bug" story is that last week while online, I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye and looked to see a big white spider running down the wall behind my computer. I made a swipe at same and thought I'd got him.
But last night I was again online, hand on mouse, reading some email, when suddenly I felt something on the back of my hand. You got it -- my buddy was back crawling over my hand. Guess he wanted to try some other site. Anyway, a quick slap, and this time for sure I'm "debugged." And this is a true story, not something I made up.
Bob Goldsmith, Bellefontaine, Ohio
BUG 2: The dream bug
My notable encounter with a bug occurred while programming. I had been working all hours of the day and night for weeks to meet a deadline, along with the rest of my team. The encounter began one of the last few days of debugging. It began in the early morning, sometime between 5 and 6 a.m., I'd guess. I don't remember falling asleep. But I remember that I kept waking up with my face on the keyboard. I'd look up and see the screen displaying a debugger, which is a tool for programmers to find bugs. I had to type one magic incantation to get the debugger to the next step of code. But I couldn't do it. I kept waking up, kind of like Groundhog Day with Bill Murray or those dreams where you know you have to run but your legs are like molasses. About 7 a.m., my friends came into my office to round me up for breakfast. When they came in I was asleep with my face on the keyboard. I woke up with a start, and saw that screen again. I don't know how long that would have continued if they had not pulled me out of my infinite loop.
Patrick Logan, Portland, Oregon
BUG 3: The disappearing-hard-disk bug
A few years ago, I was using DOS 6.0 and was limited on disk space on my old 386DX/40 computer. So I gave in and used Doublespace [to compress the disk]. Initially I was pretty happy and thought that I had somehow been one of the lucky folks who had not experienced any bugs with this program.
I booted up my computer only to find my hard drive was empty. I couldn't believe this. It had to be a mistake. So being a DOS guy, I typed in DIR, expecting to find my directory tree in place somehow. It was gone. It was all gone. After being in a near panic for about an hour, the thought came to me to check for "Hidden Files," and there it was: my entire hard drive was compacted into a single file that I had no ability to access.
I finally bought DOS version 6.2 so that I could remove Doublespace. This worked, and I got my files back. This had cost me a loss of hair and I'm sure a good chunk of my life.
Anthony M. Davis, Portsmouth, Virginia
BUG 4: The spontaneous reboot bug
I purchased a machine with a 200-MHz Cyrix 686 and 32MB of RAM for my home office. The box was running Windows 95, and initially, everything was great. About a month after I brought the machine home, it started acting up. There I was, working on a Perl script, when out of nowhere... REBOOT.
"Huh?" I thought. I immediately ran my system utilities, but everything checked out 100 percent OK. For the next month, my machine would spontaneously reboot itself, with no warning and while suffering no other diagnosable problem.
I counted 46 spontaneous reboots in a month's time, marking them down on a little piece of paper, as if I were a prison inmate counting my days in the joint.
It became a joke with my coworkers, seeing as how I am a "computer professional" but had a machine with a mind of its own. Perhaps it was something planted by one of our business competitors to hold up my production process? Perhaps not! To this day I have no idea what caused it, but I do know that one day, while I did nothing new to my OS, the rebooting stopped, and I was happy.
Dave Meeker, Cleveland, Ohio
BUG 5: The bug-fix bug
After installing Internet Explorer 4.01, the version that is supposed to fix bugs, I lost my ability to create new items -- I can't create new folders, I can't create new files, I can't even create new shortcuts (at least that option is there, though grayed out). The problem with the rest isn't that the options are grayed out -- they're not even on the menu anymore.
I had all the new Web integration options turned on. Micro$oft told me to turn them off. I did, but I still didn't get my options back. My computer worked fine before this bug "fix."
Alec Wills, Jacksonville, Florida
BUG 6: The bug that came in from the storm
Several months ago I built a start-up computer for a friend in Yuma, Arizona. (I'll call her Mary because that's her name.) Yuma was hit by a nasty storm a couple months ago, and the power service to Mary's trailer was burned. The connector and a foot or so of the power cord to the unit was cremated. The computer booted and ran OK for a while but then started to do funny things, so I brought it back here to Phoenix [to work on it]. When I turned it on (having done nothing at all to the unit) it started to boot, and then came these messages:
Keyboard and mouse swapped
Press F1 for setup or Esc to boot.I took the whole thing apart, checked the power supply voltages, checked for dust bunnies, inspected everything. Everything looked and checked out OK. I put it back together, and it runs fine. No one I know (and that includes some pretty sharp people) has the slightest idea what was wrong or has ever heard of that message, "Keyboard and mouse swapped."
George Rowe, Phoenix, Arizona
BUG 7: The Street Fighter bug
I like computer games and bought one with the title Street Fighter Series by Capcom. The box said that it included Street Fighter, Street Fighter II, and as a bonus, Mega Man and Mega Man 3. I thought, "Great! Four games in one box, on CD-ROM."
I ran the install program, which created a directory called Hitech on my C: drive. The install program copied every directory on my system (and files in those directories) into the Hitech directory. When it copied everything, it also copied another Hitech directory, filled with all the directories... and so on. So on, that is, until I ran out of hard drive space. Then the install program "crashed." But that's not the best part.
When I tried to delete the original Hitech directory, it deleted everything in that directory and everything on my C: drive. I finally got rid of it by running scandisk, which identified the Hitech directory as invalid.
Dawn Feller, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
BUG 8: The early millennium bug
One evening, I fired up my 133-MHz Pentium PC and dialed up my ISP using Windows 95's Dial-Up Networking, which had been working just fine for more than a year. Once connected, I found that if I launched Internet-related applications (browser, newsreader, and so on), that application would crash as soon as I tried to do anything with it that required communicating with my ISP.
After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I talked to my ISP's tech support folks, who convinced me that I should uninstall and reinstall Dial-Up Networking. I did, but to no avail. The problem persisted.
I called my ISP again. It suggested downloading and installing new versions of my Internet applications. I did, but the crashes continued. One more call to my ISP resulted in the suggestion that I reinstall Windows 95 (gak!). I did, and guess what? That's right! The crashes continued.
I finally discovered that, mysteriously, my CMOS clock had jumped 100 years into the future! As far as I can tell, the crashes occurred when the software tried to calculate the difference between the "current" date (100 years from now) with the time stamps on email and news articles. Call it an early taste of the year 2000 bug. I never found out how or why my clock decided to jump forward one century. I know I didn't change it. It happened a second time about three months after that, but I'm still mystified.
Shannon Lawson, Pflugerville, Texas
BUG 9: The antivirus program bug
When Windows 95 came out, I was in no hurry to get it; I wanted to wait for bug reports. But I belong to a computer club and won some Windows 95-based software, so I bought the new Windows version. I bought antivirus software at the same time. It was the first one out that I knew of, but it was a brand I always use (Norton Utilities).
Shortly thereafter I bought a new computer with a Jaz drive that used a SCSI connection. One day, I had some type of computer problem and called tech support. Support took me through a number of steps and system checks and eventually took me into DOS to run Chkdisk. When the resulting number was lower than anticipated, tech support said I had a virus. I had just run the virus scan a few days earlier with no problem! I used an emergency scan procedure, and the results were more than alarming: they showed I had 37 viruses in approximately 1,500 files! I was in shock.
I later looked up the names of some of the viruses that were found, and they all showed as "rare." So why did all these viruses show up? Apparently the first version of the antivirus software was not meant to be run in DOS. It seems it read the new Windows 95 language as viruses.
Some Microsoft bashers might agree, but not me.
Lynn Shortt, Olympia, Washington
BUG 10: The drive-by funeral home bug
As a national technical support technician, I was often out of town working on the computers from hell that refused to be fixed. One time I was in Jackson, Mississippi, working on an IBM PS2. The problem was that every morning at precisely 9:55 a.m., the computer would mysteriously reboot itself.
The software was not suspect, and the computer system had not only had all its parts replaced, but also, finally, even the system itself was replaced. The owner had not had any problems at a previous location. So, I asked what business had been in the new office prior to my client moving in: it had been a funeral home. Not just a normal funeral home but a drive-by funeral home. The kind where they would prop the bodies up in their caskets and allow mourners to drive by a viewing window at the front of the building to give their last respects. This would usually occur about 9:55 a.m. for a 10 a.m. viewing. And the computer system was sitting exactly where they had propped the bodies.
I laughed and said it must be a ghost!
Two long weeks later, I overheard one of the employees cursing out the office copy machine. It seems that when the customer moved into the new office they had also bought a very used copy machine -- the kind that has a heating element that needs to warm up in the morning, at 9:55 a.m. to be exact.
When the copy machine would start its warm-up, it sent an imperceptible signal to the heating element, and by the way of common electrical power also sent a signal to the computer system that caused it to think it was being reset. So it would reboot.
Case solved!
David R. Pille, Chaska, Minnesota