stackyFACTSSoftware engineers love assuming their code is flawless, but in the 1980s, that arrogance literally vaporized people.
Software engineers love assuming their code is flawless, but in the 1980s, that arrogance literally vaporized people. The makers of the Therac-25 radiation machine killed patients because they removed vital hardware safety interlocks, blindly trusting a jumbled mess of untested spaghetti code to manage lethal X-ray beams. A literal race condition in the software blasted people with 100 times the prescribed radiation dose while the screen cheerfully spat out 'Malfunction 54'.
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