Ten Technology Disasters

Ant writes "What do a 17th-century Swedish warship, an opulent Chicago theater and a Kansas City hotel "skyway" have in common? All met catastrophic ends and they have important lessons to teach today's innovators."

Comments

What about Banqiao and Shimantan dams

[btempleton]

A story that claims to be reporting on the greatest tech disasters, in particular the lesser known ones, and it fails to mention Banqiao and Shimantan in 1975?

I mean, not only was this the greatest technological disaster in human history with 80,000 to 230,000 dead depending on whose numbers you believe, but it also is sufficiently unknown that the author of an article on disasters doesn't appear to know of it!

Re:What about Banqiao and Shimantan dams

[nels_tomlinson]

A story that claims to be reporting on the greatest tech disasters, in particular the lesser known ones, and it fails to mention Banqiao and Shimantan in 1975?

Since the original post mentioned this as if we should be familiar with it, here're the details: A big dam in China failed, in large part because the Communist ideologues over-ruled the hydrologists. Many thousands died, but of course that's all right because the houses of the Party cadre were built on high ground. Click on that link for the fine print.

RISKS - assesment community

[DaveWood]

No discussion of the topic could be complete without mentioning RISKS. The RISKS Digest has been discussing risk factors associated with technology and engineering (and to some extent generally) on the internet since 1986.

Every engineer should spend time reading there. Any _good_ engineer should subscribe.

-David

Re:Well, I read it, and I can't see any patterns..

[Registered Coward v2]

So does anybody know of a good reference work out there which actually has some worthwhile analysis on stuff like this? Didn't Feynmann write something up after Challenger?


Yes, it appeared as an appendix to the Roger's Report. He also discussed it in his autobigraphy either "Surely your joking..." or "What do you care...", I can't remember which. The appendix is a good read, and can be found here:
http://www.ralentz.com/old/space/feynman-re port.ht ml
or any of a number of other googleable links.

Forget Ye Not the Therac-25

[ewhac]

Even if you never get near embedded systems of this type, you can't call yourself a responsible software engineer until you read and learn from An Investigation of the Therac-25 Accidents.

Executive Summary: Company introduces next-generation radiation therapy machine, replacing hardware-based overdosage safety interlocks with software-based mechanisms. Software fails. People are killed.

Schwab

Navy's Dead ship

[reflexreaction]

An article on the NT problem is available here.

From the article

The Yorktown lost control of its propulsion system because its computers were unable to divide by the number zero, the memo said. The Yorktown's Standard Monitoring Control System administrator entered zero into the data field for the Remote Data Base Manager program. That caused the database to overflow and crash all LAN consoles and miniature remote terminal units, the memo said.

And a little bit later in the article

"If you understand computers, you know that a computer normally is immune to the character of the data it processes," he wrote in the June U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedings Magazine. "Your $2.95 calculator, for example, gives you a zero when you try to divide a number by zero, and does not stop executing the next set of instructions. It seems that the computers on the Yorktown were not designed to tolerate such a simple failure."

GO ARMY!!!!!!!