For computer programmers, there was no greater affront to incur the divide by zero error. Unspeakable negligence, with potentially catastrophic consequences, which must have cost employment to more than one. They can still do it, but verification programs and identify the fault before approval system.
Join us remember the 6 errors more serious history software. We start for which he is registered as the first software error, that really did not have calamitous effects, but allowed him to name these errors, bugs called in the jargon of computer.
6. Grace Murray Hopper moth
A bug is a software error, a mistake in a program that can disable a computer or go wild and have very unfortunate consequences. Curiously, as often happens in science, the term has a trivial origin and what now defines a thing was in principle quite another.
That is, what is now called programming error, it was not in origin. The name was coined by the illustrious programmer Grace Murray Hopper, when it had not yet reached the degree of Admiral of the US Navy.
Murray Hopper was a pioneering computer. In the race to win the technology battle during World War II, scheduled in 1944, the Harvard Mark I, first electromechanical computer IBM and was the first person to develop a compiler (a kind of translator of a computer language to another) .
When started operating the Mark III, the machine suffered a failure, finding a bug had stayed at one of its circuits. Grace took the bug and taped on a billboard.
5. The millennium bug
For many years the twentieth century, the gay computer programmers were doing their job reserving only two digits to indicate the year, for example, 89 for 1989. As he approached 2000, someone asked alarmed what would happen to change, not only century, but of the millenium.
It was believed that computers would go from 99 to 00, ie, from 1999 to 1900 and all go mad. Programmers worked double shifts to correcting wrongs and nothing happened disastrous. They failed phone systems, ATMs and there were many other incidents, but none seriously.
If there was one somewhat comical: the website of the Naval Observatory United States, where the clock that marks the official time of the country is, indicated with precision the legal time, but 01 January 1910. programmers around the world pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars, correcting an error that they had created.
4. A gas history with Soviet reality and legend
Software errors can also be deliberate or desired by someone who apparently has been the most expensive of its kind in history. In the early 1980s, the world was in the Cold War and the USSR, less technologically developed than the West, had to buy many computer programs in other countries.
Of course, America was the last place they were looking for software. The Trans-Siberian gas pipeline was a major engineering works carried out by the USSR. The Russians would have preferred not to trust anyone, but they had no choice but to buy Canadian computer control system pipeline.
One version states that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) managed to manipulate the Canadian system so approve the Soviet inspection but failed at some point during operation.
It is said that the explosion of 1982 the Trans-Siberian gas pipeline has been the deafening noise produced by a human genius in history, excluding nuclear bombs. A huge mountain of rubles (still worth much) also jumped in the air, in an economy already teetering.
3. The omission of a hyphen (-) in a program thwarts the Mariner 1
In 1962, NASA considered ready to start the exploration of Venus and sent the Mariner 1 spacecraft aboard the Atlas rocket to fly over the planet named for the goddess of love in Roman mythology.
The rocket took off at full steam, but not exactly bound for Venus. At the risk of it falling into the Atlantic in the middle of the routes used by shipping, little less than 5 minutes after takeoff the most dreaded order was sent on a space mission when it is unexpected: autodestrúyete!
What happened? A programmer stopped putting a hairline (a script) in a computer instruction and rocket could not read one of their programs.
2. A rounding error of hundreds of millions of euros
How many times have rounded or 3.1 2 1.5 3? You do it without costing you anything. Not so in the flight of Ariane 5. The rocket was designed by the European Space Agency to put loads in space, especially telecommunication satellites.
In 1996 he exploded a few seconds after taking off from launch center in French Guiana The reason? A computer could not convert a floating-point operation on a 64-bit 16-bit integer. In most civil terms, could not round off a decimal number to bring it to an integer, a programming error.
1. The West is attacking us!
On September 26, 1983, while in his office at the command center of military intelligence in Moscow, the Soviet commander Stanislav Petrov, ran to warn that the USSR was under nuclear attack.
We imagine the officer to run the battery monitors, for indeed screens showed an enemy missile in inexorable march toward the "mother country" as the Russians like to say. The military are trained to remain calm in situations of high tension and Major Petrov, or received the best training available or was the pupil.
Lt. Col. Petrov kept the serenity and reasoned that it made no sense an attack with a single missile and decided to wait a few seconds. The short wait worse. The screens showed that four other missiles were headed to the USSR. Not informing the superiority and verged on treason, but the man thought again that he had no logic an attack with just 5 missiles, why attack 5 if you are going to respond with hundreds or thousands?
The world did not know, but several years later, how close nuclear holocaust. After waiting another agonizing moment, the threat vanished from the screens and nothing broke in the Soviet Union. The software of a military satellite of the USSR had been deceived by the sun's rays. Petrov was harshly punished, but perhaps saved the world, including his own life.
The building in which it was had been one of the first to be destroyed when the United States responded to a Russian counterattack motivated by a false attack. In 2006, the UN declared "World Citizen" Stanislav Petrov Yevgrafovich.
Did you know these costly software errors? What did you think?