Top 10 worst software bugs... EVAR!

www.wired.com...

That Wired article listed the worst software bugs in history. This particular one caught my attention about the CIA planting a bug in software to make gas pipeline asplode. Hollywood movie style.

1982 -- Soviet gas pipeline. Operatives working for the Central Intelligence Agency allegedly plant a bug in a Canadian computer system purchased to control the trans-Siberian gas pipeline. The Soviets had obtained the system as part of a wide-ranging effort to covertly purchase or steal sensitive U.S. technology. The CIA reportedly found out about the program and decided to make it backfire with equipment that would pass Soviet inspection and then fail once in operation. The resulting event is reportedly the largest non-nuclear explosion in the planet's history.

That remind me of the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier that went dead in the water after a computer crash in September 1998. Aboard the USS Yorktown an officer entered the character zero into the database while calibrating a fuel valve, and for some reason the software couldn't handle it. Somehow that caused a LAN failure, WTF?! Then 27 Pentium computers running Windows NT crashed, which rendered the ship useless for 3 hours. Gotta love those computars, yah baby!

Do you know of any computer bugs that went wrong? Doesn't matter if it was not catastrophic or anything, tell us the story.

Well, I was running an old Apple IIC back in '88 and was tinkering with HI-RES graphic re-programming within a LOW-RES version of "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?" program.

Well needless to say, the program shut down, and saved the following to the floppy in place of the program:

10 goto 70
70 home
80 goto 10

Yeah...that was a nightmare considering the school district owned that copy of the software.

(sorry for my sarcastic repsone, I just couldn't help it I will try to think of a real software problem and re-post)

- One Man Short








[edit on 9-11-2005 by One Man Short of Manhood]