Andrew Tei's Therac-25
Explanation Making (dark) humour of a tragic situation, this author
uses South Park characters to explain what went wrong. The facts are
indeed true here (although Kenny didn't really die :-)
BAD SOFTWARE! We've all encountered the dreaded 'Blue Screen of Death' on our PCs. Unfortunately, there are a large number of software developers who feel that rebooting the system or reinstalling software is a normal 'fix' for problems in their code.
Imagine a safety-critical system controlled by a computer which has 'bugs' in the code. It is not hard to imagine this, since it happened a few years ago in the THERAC-25 radiation therapy machine produced by AECL (Atomic Energy Cananda, Ltd). Several people died from accidental overdoses of radiation. The problems were all traced back to POOR SOFTWARE.
Andrew Tei's Therac-25
Explanation Making (dark) humour of a tragic situation, this author
uses South Park characters to explain what went wrong. The facts are
indeed true here (although Kenny didn't really die :-)
An Investigation of the Therac-25 Accidents
An online paper that was published in the IEEE Computer journal.
There are numerous papers on the Therac-25 problem. Use a search engine to find out more.
Source: TECH238G Lecture notes by Mark Csele