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Anniversary of the First Computer Bug
aheath writes "According to the
US Naval Historical Center the first computer bug was logged on September 9, 1945 at 15:45: "Moth found trapped between points at Relay # 70, Panel F, of the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator while it was being tested at Harvard University, 9 September 1945. The operators affixed the moth to the computer log, with the entry: "First actual case of bug being found". They put out the word that they had "debugged" the machine, thus introducing the term "debugging a computer program".
The Wikipedia has a "computer bug" entry that lists some other "famous bugs" including the fictional HAL 9000 bug. What is your favorite computer bug story?"
September 9, 1945 at 15:45: "Moth found trapped between points at Relay # 70, Panel F [..] "
September 10, 1945 at 08:02: "Darl McBride Sr. claims he owns the moth."
September 10, 1945 at 23:53: "We snuck into Darl's room and put his hand in a bucket of warm water."
September 11, 1945 at 09:46: "Darl gets to work late but is proud to show us 'his' new bucket. We all hate him."
Trolling is a art,
Somehow, saying "First actual case of bug being found" seems fake to me. It's like finding cavalry sword from the first world war with the inscription, "Corporal James Smith, Third Mounted Infantry, World War One." You'd know that even if the sword was real, the inscription was years after WWII, making it less valuable, and lessening it's voracity.
Or is this the first actual case because they suspected before there were actual bugs in the system but never found them?
Then again maybe it was just prophetic. Like NASA when the STS missions launch(ed): "3...2...1...Liftoff! [message about this mission and it's 'first' for space here]"
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Those things really multiply don't they?
First you find ONE in a computer relay. Then, almost sixty years later, they've multiplied so that there's one in every program I write.
Like cockroaches.
You just can't get rid of them. They're hard to find. And when you squash one, three more come from nowhere!
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
"Moth found trapped between points at Relay # 70, Panel F, of the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator
:-)
Cool. I always wondered about the etymology of "computer bug", and now I know the etymology is truly related to entymology.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Personally, I think "de-snaked" is more impressive
Fried Snake
Win98 crashing on Bill Gates in front of millions of viewers.
Will code a sig generator for food
according to opera...
"The origin of the word "bug" has wrongly been associated with an incident where a moth was pulled out of a Mark II computer. Apparently, the term was used prior to modern computers to mean an industrial or electrical defect."
Why do I h8 apple?
it was when I read an article on slashdot and I tried to reply, then suddenly my fingers slipp
By the way they logged the bug, "first actual case of bug being found" the term was already in use and they were pointing out the irony that the bug in this case was a real bug
Free cell phone tracking
The etymology of the word "bug" as we know it dates to long before the first computers were introduced. This just happens to be the first COMPUTER related bug on record. My guess is that it's a joke, i.e. "hey, Bob we found that BUG in the system. yuk yuk yuk."
My favorite bug was in an existing product that had been on the shelves for a while and went through numerous patches to fix many bugs. Going through the testing, I found the UI could not be moved around the screen with a left handed mouse configuration! Immediately, I dropped the bong and decided a cup of coffee and looking on a few other machines were in order. Did those and the bug was legit. Sent it to development and they scrubbed it "as designed". Silly bug, but I can't believe no one tested or complained about it.
Could I spray a can of Raid on my RAID disks to eliminate bugs?
...was that an update to Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator (a small screen over the air intake) was developed on 1 September 1945, but the navy was too slow in installing the patch.
In lieu of this great event, we should all celebrate by releasing herds of moths in our computers!!!
...when technicians and programmers found the bugs. Now vendors just release the code and rely on the users to do all the "debugging".
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
When I was doing inhouse tech support for a large company that makes green tractors, I got a ticket about a system that was having random lockups. After investigating, I found that the lockups were indeed random, so set out to try swapping the RAM first. Judge of my surprise to find a tiny spider caught against the base of a SIMM, blackened and crispy. If someone had told me that there's enough juice flowing through a RAM chip to fry even a spider, I wouldn't've believed it, but there the little critter was. I couldn't believe that little bug alone would be causing a problem, but on a whim I left the chip in, sans spider, and behold, the system worked perfectly.
Odd, that.
And although it's not a bug, I have had someone bring a computer into my shop for locking up, and found a live mouse in it. It escaped into the shop and I believe it lives here on Dorito crumbs to this very day.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
What the fuck is so funny about that moderators?
What is your favorite computer bug story?
On Windows 98: Start, Run: C:\con\con
But my real favourite is when Bill Gaets introduced Windows 98 with the famous USB scanner blue screen.
"...a generation of kids has grown up thinking Trance is the shittiest music since country and western." - Paul van Dyk
It's a new and exciting feature!
Stop over-analyzing your analizations
The Schrodenbug...named after the Theroy of Schrodinger's cat...where by if you put a cat in a box, its not truely dead until you look at it again...
This is a bug which while in existance in your code has no effect until you happen to notice it, in the code. Then suddenly the effect of having this bug begins to appear. While until you noticed it, the effect never appeared and the program ran as intended.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
way back, my first job... only 2 programmers, me and another guy who worked from home over a 9600baud modem. We had no CVS or anything like it(we were noob).
The "bug" in question was merely him and me modifying the same file every other day. I used i,j,k,z for iterator variables. He had the habit of using i,j,k,m. The file had 2 functions, one with a parameter z, the other with a parameter m.
I guess you can figure out how horrible such things can get. It took weeks before we figured out it was a naming issue.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Windows ME
Could we please stop hearing about it?
The The Jargon File covers this and includes a picture of the bug in the entry on "bug" and states:
John.To be specific, that first bug was recorded by future Admiral "Amazing" Grace Hopper, a (rare female) Line Navy officer (as opposed to a WAVE or Naval Reserve officer.) Her name has gone on to one of the most modern guided missile destroyers. She was quite a remarkable woman, read up on her career if you get the chance.
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
Here are some bad bugs.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Well, except that instead of miscalculating your home budget you could rain nuclear destruction upon the world...
I still think the bug in converting between metric and imperial units causing a billion dollar Mars probe to crash is the top one.
Regards,
--
*Art
Doing some tech work in Brooklyn, NY. I got a call from a small company (3 machines in a business run out of a apartment).
Well one of the machines was making funny sounds. I heard the machine when I arived and it sounded like a wire was caught in the fan. I opened the case and about 10 very large and nasty roaches ran out, there were about 20 dead ones inside the case.
It seems the 80mm fan in the back got pushed in an left a nice hole in the case, which the 2 childern in the house used to put food they didn't want to eat.
I refused to clean the machine out, and told them what they had to do, I got outta their as soon as I could, trying not to vomit thinking about the roach guts on the CPU fan.
"The word "genius" isn't applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein," - Joe Theisman
I don't know if this counts, but here goes:
I worked as student help at a college that had a PDP-11 based mainframe. One night it went down. Computer techs were called out but could find nothing wrong. This continued night after night at about the same time each night. So the techs hung around after hours to keep an eye on it.
Around 6:30pm, the cleaning woman came in with her vaccuum cleaner. She promptly went over to the wall socket, unplugged the mainframe, plugged in her vaccuum cleaner and started vaccuuming the floor.
"What is your favorite computer bug story?"
Windows XP is the fastest and most secure operating system EVER!
It depends. If he was trying to show that the SCO jokes are as old and tired as the Al Gore jokes then he is very witty. Otherwise he is just a moron.
...here.
Linux has the Penquin..
If Anything Windows is the bug.... Have you seen that rainbow butterfly.. Not only is it a bug, it's proud of it. Why else would it dance around like a fairy.
Would have to be the X-box getting the blue screen of death. Good stuff.
"I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals. I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants."
"The text of the log entry (from September 9, 1947), reads 1545 Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of bug being found. This wording establishes that the term was already in use at the time in its current specific sense -- and Hopper herself reports that the term bug was regularly applied to problems in radar electronics during WWII.
Indeed, the use of bug to mean an industrial defect was already established in Thomas Edison's time, and a more specific and rather modern use can be found in an electrical handbook from 1896 (Hawkin's New Catechism of Electricity, Theo. Audel & Co.) which says: The term 'bug' is used to a limited extent to designate any fault or trouble in the connections or working of electric apparatus. It further notes that the term is said to have originated in quadruplex telegraphy and have been transferred to all electric apparatus."
http://catb.org/jargon/html/B/bug.html
Perhaps the most influential bugs of all time were those that allowed the Morris worm to propogate. Sendmail, fingerd, rsh/rexec.. all to blame. The worm led to the formation of CERT. Quite influential.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Comma? Period? Does it really matter THAT much?
--
but a real coder has no *favorite* stories about bugs, only their worst nightmares.
How about spending three days trying to track down a bug that ends up being in a third-party floating point library. (The old DOS-extender days with High C/C++ compiler & whatnot).
Those are not good memories in my book. I like to let those memories just drift away into nothingness.
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
For true peace & happiness -- www.mihr.com
...because their free 90 days of support had run out on 31 August 1945 and they didn't want to pay the $500 annual support contract.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
Seen on the license plate of a VW Beetle: FEATURE
Arbitrary sig
While working on an embedded printer driver board, I had just burned new firmware and installed it, tested it, and, because we had had an incident where the internals of another printer had melted together, left it off and unplugged. Five minutes later one of the applications programmers came storming into my office claiming that my new firmware was crap. I calmly walked back out to the lab, looked over the machine, and commented "it works better if you plug it in..."
Antz is my favorite Computer Bug Story
Am I the only one who realizes that this post is full of shit? I mean mod it funny if you want but it is no more interesting than the guy who made the SCO joke.
What if they had found a marmot or a preschooler or something? "I be at work late sweets, we're de-marmoting tonight.
they didn't find a rabbit in there. Then we'd all be referring to "derabbiting" or "derabbitizing" the program.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
I first heard of this right here on Slashdot. Wish I could remember who posted it that time so that I could give them proper attribution. Oh well.
o ry -about-magic.html
http://jargon.watson-net.com/section.asp?f=a-st
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
In the late 80s or early 90s there was a software company that ran a promotion that they would give you a VW bug if you found a bug in their product. I can't remember what company or software package this was but I thought that was a bold statement about the quality of their software. Too bad very few companies could get away with that now.
The term bug when referring to a flaw in a mechanism does NOT originate in the coputer machinery of 1945. In fact, it is much older, and is traceable to as far back as Tom Edison:
On November 18, 1878, Edison wrote to Theodore Puskas, "It has been just so in all my inventions. The first step is an intuition--and comes with a burst, then difficulties arise. This thing gives out and then that--"Bugs"--as such little faults and difficulties are called--show themselves and mo nths of anxious watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success--or failure--is certainly reached" (Matthew Josephson, Edison: A Biography, John Wiley & Sons, 1992, page 198).
An interesting sidenote to this, 'bug' was actually in usage before the bug was found; it was an acronym for Byte Under Guard, used when an if/then block failed to test the byte properly.
The term "bug" was in use long before 1945, but the term "byte" only goes back to 1959 (according to www.m-w.com). The acronym for "Byte Under Guard" sounds like a back-formation.
Also, according to The Jargon File, the log entry with the moth is from September 9, 1947, not 1945. See here.
plus, they have to pay some stock markup frauds/felons, to remain non-functional/in their infactdead state?
talk about yOUR buggIE sheeples?
is the one that let people widen/lengthen slashdot pages.
... is the bug in the Patriot anti-missile system!
url
an error in the way it rounded 1/10000th of seconds made it less and less accurate proportionnally to the time since it had been booted up!
so remember to always reboot your anti-missiles counter-mesures before using them!
Okay, back in the day(tm), I worked in technical support at Spry, makers of Internet in a Box(tm). One of my duties was to write up bug reports for the internal support system for the tech support reps.
:)
Turns out we had a bug in Spry Mosaic that, when it hit an empty IMG tag (as in, nothing else in the tag but the letters IMG), it would instantly crash. When I wrote up the document, I forgot to escape the less-than and greater-than marks, so it put the actual tag in the tech support document.
The upshot - when the tech support reps searched the database for 'crash in browser', one of the hits that would come up was the document I made - when they loaded it to see the details on 'crash in browser', that's exactly what they got. Ooops.
I can laugh about it now.
Actually, I laughed about it then, too.
I used to work for a company that sold live frogs and such. There were constant escapees and on more than one occasion an IBM repairman had to pull an ex-frog out of our System/38.
A Heisenbug is a bug that goes away when you look for it and reappears when you stop looking.
I guess you had to be there.
... all versions of windows
Re-read parent - as he says, the way in which they wrote the log entry wouldn't make sense if that were true. They were being sarcastic when they affixed the moth to the log book, writing "First actual case of bug being found." This strongly implies that things were called "bugs" previously, but that they weren't literally insects. These guys had a sense of humor.
So the term was in use before these guys found the insect - this is simply the first incidence of the insect as in the urban legend, which postdates the original usage.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
the bugs are everywhere! if i just got off the computer, i could debug the place, damn, can't do it.
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
My personal favorite bug:
http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?phase +of+the+moon
The log entry with the moth is from September 9, 1947, not 1945.
From the OED:
b A defect or fault in a machine, plan, or the like. orig. U.S.
There's so many...how can I choose just one?
When I worked as a technicion for UPS I was often called upon to visit customers at their businesses or homes. I visited this guy near Pt. Charlotte, FL (and that's another horror story in itself) who had a PC damaged during shipping. I should have known before I entered his house that it would be BAD -- there were shopping carts, old engines, tree branches all around his property. When I finally navigated through his living room into his (horrors) bedroom where the PC sat, I was already getting nauseous.
"What's wrong with it?" I asked, since there didn't seem to be any damage.
"It won't turn on," said he.
OK, no problem. As a technician we were allowed to pop open the PC to check if it was simply a cable or card that came loose during shipping. No problem. I pulled out my screwdriver and started undoing the case. Soon as popped the top a bunch of massive roaches scampered out.... followed by dozens of little miniature ones. Now, I HATE ROACHES. I can play with grasshoppers, earthworms, beetles, and other critters but roaches just give me the willies. The guy just looked at them marching around as if they were some little pets. With supreme effort I put everything back together and turned on the PC. It booted! The only sickenging thing was this flick-flick noise coming from the fan. I think there's a roach still lodged in the fan to this day, its little antennae wiggling, its nasty little legs twitching back and forth. flick-flick-flick...
(true story)
I call bullshit on this one. A Google search of this phrase yields nothing.
"byte under guard" indeed. Who moderated this +5 ? We need "moderation under guard" (MUG(tm)) here!
Although geeks like us are enjoying a discussion and the origins of this particular term, I think it's starting to get watered down a bit. I hear a lot of the "unwashed masses" referring to Windows Worms and Viruses as "There's a new Bug going around" etc.
I realise this is something minor, but in a way it kinda bugs me (no puns!) about how much of "our" culture (if i'm qualified to say that) is going to get misappropriated by those `on the outside'.
This might be similar to the whole "cracker vs. hacker" meanings in the media and whatnot.
I hear more and more "less tech savvy" people using typical "computer related" keywords incorrectly, yet it is amazing how similarly it gets done by those `on the outside'.
It is almost as if computer jargon and terminology is starting to fork() into separate dialects.
Ok, mod me -1 Offtopic.
do() || do_not();
As I learned it, a byte is the smallest directly addressable unit of memory. There were indeed machines with 6-bit bytes and 9-bit bytes, etc. I think old versions of TeX can actually be compiled and run on any machine with at least 6-bit bytes.
A word was the most natural size for the processor, typically the size of the accumulator or general purpose registers. Lots of classic texts refer to machines with "36-bit words" and the like. Those terms all got corrupted.
It's interesting to note that many RFCs and specs use "octet" to refer to an eight-bit quantity on the off-chance that your bytes are different.
That's utter nonsense.
Beware of folk etymology.
Proverbs 21:19
Why do people perpetuate this myth? Sure it's a nice story, and sure, it might even be true. But the word 'bug' as in 'error in a program', wasn't coined until much later at the MIT media labs (think maybe Negroponte himself were involved).
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
What am I missing?
(The linked articles didn't give any hints either.)
Your Servant, B. Baggins
I used to work on debuggers. The hardest bugs to find were bugs in the debugger. Why? You have to debug the debugger.
The absolute hardest bug I ever tracked down was actually a kernel bug. When single-stepping in assembly over a branch-shadow instruction, the application state was corrupted. It only happened on one particular model of RISC chip and only with a certain version of the kernel. Bleh!
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
my favorite bug would be when an ant colony decided to move into an iBook :)
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
I bet it's your favorite.
Separately, Tenner points out that 'bug' was used by telegraphers as the name for hidden faults in circuits, and that it also had a literal meaning for operators, since Western Union offices were notoriously dirty and insect-infested. In 1868, Thomas Edison, who started as a telegraph operator, invented an early version of an electrical zapper to debug his desktop.
myself
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
I see links to the HAL 9000 bug, but no mention of the bug. Why?
I figure the bug is that HAL became a murder. Just wondering why link without any description.
-- Boycott Shell
As I learned it, a byte is the smallest directly addressable unit of memory.
The PDP-10 supported variable byte sizes, anywhere from 1 to 36 bits. The Jargon File says that the term goes back to 1956.
8-bit bytes are almost, but not quite, universal today.
In the context of the C programming language standard, a byte is by definition the number of bits in a character; it must be at least 8 bits, but can be more.
You've been slashdotted..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
Sheetrock is a karma whore troll. Please review his past posts and you will see that they all contains lies and exagerrations. He gets modded up because he "tows the slashdot line" with his opinions.
He exists only to abuse and mock the slashdot moderation system. Please mod accordingly.
We were wading through this web tips-submission application for a very popular "law enforcement" television show, and we found that the previous programmer had inserted code which benefitted his garage band. After storing the user's tip, the script was sending the user's information on to High Times magazine so that his band would appear to have a huge fan base.
Just think of all of the pro-hemp email that those poor, watchful grandmothers will receive!
- JML
However, it suddenly stopped working and it had turned out that during an upgrade the number had been changed slightly. The leading 9 (to dial for an outside line) had been removed. Therefore rather than hitting an outside line, it would dial 0 (getting the receptionist) and then try to negotiate with her before hanging up. Three minutes later, it would try again and again - until it had retried and failed 10 times.
The poor receptionist hadn't reported it to anyone and it was only after about a week did they find the problem. She'd put up with 10 calls a day for 5 days without saying a word. She thought it was some prank caller.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Couldn't resist the "favorite computer bug" temptation...
In college, around 1982, a friend had a micro by a company called Ohio Scientific, a Challenger something-or-other (I think that's right). The machine was running a BASIC interpreter, and had a character set that supported some simple games. Among the special characters supported were "tanks" in various orientations, so one could write a simple tank hunting game. Which he did.
We noticed when we started playing that we could move the tank offscreen and back, since he hadn't put any bounds checking to constrain the tank movement. When we toured too far offscreen, however, the program crashed.
We typed LIST to have a look at where bounds checking might be added to the code, and we found the runaway tank. Leaving a swath of blank spaces behind it, there was the tank character embedded in a line of BASIC source code...
to indicate some sort of mechanical defect or malfunction. In his great 1943 book Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo Ted Lawson described his first experience with the--at the time--cutting edge B-25 bomber aircraft: "I saw a lot of B-25's after that. I flew a succession of them as they went through their growing pains. Maybe I helped shake a few 'bugs' out of their first model."
Your post implies that they were once funny, which is false like Kate Fents teeth.
..you have been slashdotted."
HAL: "No, I haven't, Dave. Everything is quite normal here."
DAVE: "Trust me, your web site is overloaded and inaccessable."
HAL: "Dave, I think you are imagining things. Would you like to take a stress pill?"
DAVE: "No HAL I would not. Please open the pod bay door."
HAL: "I am afraid I cannot do that Dave. Would you like to hear this song Dr Chandra taught me? Daisy, Daisy..."
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
The actuall real bug was taped into the book because it was an actual *real* bug. The Pun was intended back then aswell. The term debugging had been used earlier when debugging ENIAC (real bugs too) and finding unusual and nerving errors.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Take the Windows 3.1 or 3.11 calculator, enter 2.11 - 2.1 and look at the result (zero!).
Still don't know if that bug affected the calculator only or, worse, the math libraries (ie the entire system). Luckily I don't use a Microsoft product since ages.
The word "bug" occurs in many engineering books and school texts in the late 1800s. Also, IIRC, there was a movie in the ca. 1940 (Jimmy Stewart?) about Thomas Edison who was preparing to turn on city lights at the end of the movie and when his wife asked how it was going, he responded, "Well, Jumbo (the biggest generator) developed a few bugs at the end, but it's working now."
Admiral Hopper frequently has been attributed with the bug story but having had dinner with her two or three times every year in college, one comes to realize it wasn't as straightforward as it should have been.
...drum roll... Any Windows OS *rim shot (*ducks)
b. A defect or fault in a machine, plan, or the like. orig. U.S.
1889 Pall Mall Gaz. 11 Mar 1/1 Mr. Edison, I was informed, had been up the two previous nights discovering 'a bug' in his phonograph-an expression for solving a difficulty, and implying that some imaginary insect has secreted itself inside and is causing all the trouble.
Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition
Quoted from Chapter 5 of The Practice of Programming, by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike.
Fellowship 9/11
Personally, I dislike my swords to be voracious.
Signed,
HRM Elric of Melnibone
The M.C. Escher like Windows is the brand of the Windows Operating System.
I know you're probably thinking of those "fish-become-swans" lithographies, but COME ON! That's like comparing Eminem to Beethoven.
Since the moth took down the machine it would also qualify as the first computer hacker.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Remember the Y2K "bug"? Well before 1999 came along, I had some code to automatically update a website every morning promptly at midnight. It worked flawlessly until the morning of January 1, 1999, when the version displayed on the site was the earliest version available in the file system, not the version for January 1st. My code was evidently ignoring years entirely, something that I hadn't caught in debugging - but in those go-go days of the dotcom boom, all that mattered was that it ran successfully for a few months.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
My favorite bug followed me from one system to the next!
I was writing Logo for the 512K Macintosh. The only programming environment supported for the Mac in 1984 and 1985 was Pascal on the Lisa, but we wrote our code in C on a 68000 running Unix and cross-compiled to the Mac using the SUMEX PCC compiler.
Anyway, I was changing something in the garbage collector, compiled on the 68000 running Unix, and got an assembler error that was something like this:
00800: #,1,$,g,a,q:2 Illegal Instruction
It was really weird -- I had no idea how the compiler could output an illinst. I narrowed it down to this line:
marked = 0x80000000 & addr;
I turned to a different computer, the Logo interpreter running on the Mac 512 behind me, and typed
2^31
and it printed out
Result: #,1,$,g,a,q:2
At this point I ran screaming down the hall.
When I came back, I looked at the source for PCC itoa() (if anybody still has this you can reproduce it and tell me the exact string) and it had
if (value
which of course fails on -2147483648. But the failure mode was pretty spectacular.
The Logo on the Mac had the same bug because it was running the SUMEX libc, which of course had the same bug.
I ust patched it with
if (i == 0x80000000) return "-2147483648";
Yow.
The poster is, in the main, correct in his ASSertation, but there are underlying justifications to the extraction:
First, classical computers may, to a crude degree, be considered "powerful" as a function of their clock speed and complexity. Roughly this power has been increasing at an exponential rate according to "Moore's Law."
Quantum computers are entirely different in a way that matters for certain classes of problems, particularly sorting and testing. These classes of problems are well suited, for example, to "brute force" breaking encryption. A quantum computer's "power" in solving this class of problem increases to the power of the number of "entangled cubits", a number which has roughly doubled every two years as compared to Moore's 18 month period - and to classical computing's roughly linear increase in power with complexity.
Moore's "law" isn't a law at all, but has been useful in predicting computational power. This reformulation I propose is valid in hindsight over a trivially short observation period. It does seem like a useful exercise to think about the potentials of quantum computers and to make a "what if" sort of assessment of the future of computing.
The statement that only a few quantum transistors have thus far been assembled, is not entirely true. First, the computational structures of quantum computers and classical computers are not precisely analogous, second quantum computers have been used to perform calculations according to prediction in organized structures more complex than an equivalent "transistor."
http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9801037
...anyone else notice it is also google's fifth birthday?
Ariane in 1996
Ariane in 2002
the americans were busy playing tetris while europe destroyed itself.
Comment: Yes I realise the username 'fuckfuck101' makes me sound intelligent, no you cannot buy it from me.
An ATM at a branch of the bank that I worked at developed a fault wherein it incorrectly reported its location. A guy used the machine while on a business trip. When his statement arrived it looked as if he had been somewhere else at the time. His wife accused him of lying and having an affair.
Eventually the bank was contacted and the fault confirmed, but by then the statement data had been archived to tape. We had to patch the archive statement suite to check each and every archive statement transaction request for the erroneous one and then modify it on-the fly to return the corrected information. The patch stayed in for many years until the data was migrated to new archive devices, when the data was permanently corrected.
Of course that was just one single transaction. There were probably hundreds that were wrong and who knows what happened in all those other cases.
Political Correctness is doubleplusungood.
Once upon a time where I worked, sat a lowly PC whose sole job was to extract data from a PABX, and write it to a daily log text file on the server for the accounting system to pick up later.
So far, so good, for many moons.
Came to work, PC had hung. Reboot, and all is well. A few days later, and then about every 2 out 3 days, it hung. Started to get annoying.
It always failed about 10PM. So I stood watch. At 10PM, a loud thump is heard as the air conditioning shuts down. PC has hung. Eureka! Power spike! Noise!
Replace power supply, add filter for good measure.
Next day, it hangs again. Move PC to UPS.
Yeah, it hung again.
Turned out to be the backup task running on the server. As the log file was being backed up to tape, it was locked. The stupid program doing the updating wasn't expecting ITS FILE to be locked, couldn't handle it, so it crashed. One new program later...
Your code only blows up when running in New Jersey.
I heard this story first (or possibly second) hand in Sweden; specifically Goteborg.
So, this is for admissions for dental school, about 5 years ago. Some bug causes the students with the _lowest_ test scores to be admitted.
The error is discovered but then the admission decisions have already been sent out. The school finds it inhumane to retract the offers those who have been admitted in error. However, they also find it unfair for the most qualified students: it is decided to admit both groups.
The funniest part is that rumor has it that there was no significant difference in performance between the two groups.
Tor
The system was a database of questionnaires, hooked up to an OMR with a fairly high capacity feeding mechanism, for reading multiple-choice (fill-in-the-boxes) questionnaires. The OMR setup was in one room and the DB server on another site, where I was running various queries.
Occasionally the totals of answers ticked would be obviously wrong in the reports; after several days of fighting with the reporting stuff and the mark intepretation software I actually went in the room where the forms were being run through the OMR and discovered that it was full of little flies attracted through an open window by the heat and humidity. The flies were getting stuck on the forms and on the rollers of the OMR feeder, causing false positives on the questionnaires.
Patch was to shut the window, clean the OMR feeder and invest in some bugspray for the temp who had been happily running fly corpses through the OMR for several days.
-- Nothing unusual happened today
I test space station software for a living,
and I do in fact have to do a written log sheet
when we run a test formally.
The test is also observed by a government observer, we verify the hardware and software configuration is per drawing before starting a set of formal tests, and I print and attach the test results to the log sheet. Then it gets reviewed by a number of people here, and sent to NASA, where it gets reviewed by some more people.
By the way, we have our share of insect problems, too. We occasionally get ant infestations under the raised floor in the computer room. It's most likely due to the break area in the basement being right underneath us (fridges & microwaves)
Daniel
PEBCAK
Cheers!
E
http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
========
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
I'm sure all of you remember the ant infested iBook story.
Apollos were well networked, and it was possible to manipulate the parameters of the windowing system on one machine from another machine (like you can with X Window system, given sufficient permissions).
The Apollos had a command to change the mouse speed (similar to the X "xset m" command). It took a numeric value specifying the pointer distance to travel per unit time. The bug was that if you specified a negative value, the mouse pointer would travel backwards. No big surprise really, and not very interesting.
When this bug was discovered but not yet fixed or widely known, someone decided to play a practical joke, and walked into a fellow hacker's office and sat at his workstation and started playing with his mouse. A few seconds later (with the help of a hidden assistant in another office), the hacker says, hey look, there's something wrong with your mouse, it's all backwards. Sure enough, the mouse is acting all upside-down. The prankster then says, hey, I know what's wrong, have you cleaned your mouse lately? You must have put your mouse ball in upside down. He then pops the mouse ball out and pops it back into the mouse, and sure enough (with hidden assistance), the mouse works normally again. The victim of the practical joke was, of course, entirely puzzled.
And I'm sure the first "mugging" was done with a coffee mug...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
A debugged program is one that contains only unobserved bugs.
A coworker has this gem in his history.
It was the day before Christmas, and being a company of about 8 people they were, shall we say, taking it easy. A client had called in for help with a small error with an order they were working on. He couldn't dial in ('96-ish, supporting via modem) and asked them to reset the modem. She asked 'you mean the box with the lights?' He said yeah.
(Wait for it.)
Suddenly, everyone in that company started to report that their screens stopped responding. Yep; she turned the main Unix server off and on.
Needless to say, he didn't do much 'take it easy' for a while that day.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
It school in the late '70s, they purchased a second PDP 11-34, and the sys admins thought "wouldn't it be cool if we could get the two machines to communicate!" So they connected a serial port on one to a serial port on the other. Tried to send a packet... Boom! Both machines immediately crashed. Rebooted, reconnected the serial port, started a send, crashed again. Finally, it dawned on them... they hadn't disabled terminal echo. When the first character was sent, it was immediately echoed by the second machine, then echoed by the first, etc. Comm interrupts were high priority and a lot of overhead on the PDP, so the machines never left the interrupt handler, and essentially were hung.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
This explains the MS butterfly ads! MS is obliquely telling us they _know_ their products are buggy, flaunting it in the face of all humanity.
We need a really big beach bonfire somewhere Redmond.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
Well, he said, there was this funky wired up typewriter type thing that was the data input. Once you entered your problem and the computer finished calculating it, you had to open a door and WALK INSIDE THE COMPUTER and count the lightbulbs. On = 1, off = zero. There were banks of bulbs...
He said the computer itself was huge and took up most of a warehouse in Northern Virginia. This was all in the late 1940s, and he worked for the Pentagon. He said the pocket calculator he got for opening a bank account was more powerful than the humungus machine he had to deal with in the 40s.
Sorta puts things in perspective.
I asked him about reliability of components, and he said they had a problem with mice for a while, but due to the large voltages this thing ran on, it was usually a self correcting pest problem, and one easily detected: the smell of burning fur is rather distinctive...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I spent a few weeks on this one.
Had a computer lab in an old recording studio w/ grid lighting above. Outlet boxes would plug into the grid and you could slide them back and forth.
We had these old Digital Equipment Corp.'s (DEC) IVIS workstations, which allowed you to do multimedia (Laserdisc, video overlay, touchscreen). Solid machines, cost some $18k each, and this was in the mid 80s.
Anyway, one machine kept crashing during terminal emulation. Reinstalling the terminal emulator didn't help, neither did reinstalling the OS, nor did a low level format and reinstall.
Luckily we had a service contract on these machines. The service rep came, and in the end replace everything - HD, modem, overlay graphics, motherboard, powersupply, everything. Nothing worked. On a whim, we decided to move the machine to another electric box (remember the grid I mentioned earlier,) well that seemed to work. One by one we replaced everything with the original swapped out piece, but nothing seemed to bring back the problem.
In the end, we were back to our original computer configuration. And, the machine worked fine. We tried plugging it back into the original outlet and the terminal emulator brought the machine down again. For some reason, that particular machine did not like that outlet.
Only took a few weeks to get that one resolved. Actually, in the end, we never figured out what the exact power issue was, but it was fine if we moved it to another outlet.
Go figure.
PS - My favorite hack is the 'Cookie Monster' hack.
>The Wikipedia has a "computer bug" entry that lists some other "famous bugs" including the fictional HAL 9000 bug.
.36 seconds during the 4-day continuous siege, the error increasing with elapsed time since the system was turned on. This software flaw prevented real-time tracking. The specifications called for aircraft speeds, not Mach 6 missiles, for 14-hour continuous performance, not 100. Patched software arrived via air one day later.
Yeah, it lists them, but doesn't really link to good stories -- so...
An error in a single FORTRAN statement resulted in the loss of the first American probe to Venus.
Software reboot during the Apollo 11 landing forced Armstrong to manually land the lunar lander.
An Iraqi Scud missile hit Dhahran barracks, leaving 28 dead and 98 wounded. The incoming missile was not detected by the Patriot defenses, whose clock had drifted
The Ariane 5 satellite launcher malfunction was caused by a faulty software exception routine resulting from a bad 64-bit floating point to 16-bit integer conversion.
lots more here and here.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
I was going to complain about that, too.
Also, TAE may not have been the first to use the term. An excerpt of his journal (I forget where I read it) referred to the term "bug" as jargon in use around his shop.
Clear, Dark Skies
Didn't Al Gore invent the term BUG as it relates to computers and the internet?
Tracking #: 121144608
Title: Bush robot constantly makes grammatic mistakes and makes up words.
Problem Detail:
Corporate puppet robot model George W. Bush (serial #44625441) exhibits erratic grammatical behavior when deviating from scripted speeches. Often uses words like "subliminable", "methodological", "mispronunciated", "stregic", and "permanency" in place of their English equivalents. Platinum users (Haliburton, Exxon/Mobil, Chevron, Bechtel, Kenneth Lay) have noticed other erratic grammatical behavior, including such phrases as "is our children learning", "we need to make the pie higher", and "will the highways on the internet become more few". Strongly suspect some Jim Beam spilled into the model's grammar logic circuits during an all-night instructional binge session with Barbara and Jenna. Suggest immediate implementation of gaffe-filtering algorithm on all corporate media modules to limit the damage from this bug.
Problem Resolution:
Media filters in place as of 12 SEP 2001. Language errors are no longer being reported in the corporate media. Suggest further workaround of detaining at Guantanamo Bay register all non-corporate media modules that are incompatible with gaffe-filtering algorithm.
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
It was on an IBM OS/2 box that had the intrusion detection switches on the case. My predicessor had to fiddle with the modem cards all the time so he took the switch off the case and wrapped a rubber band around it. That way he didn't have to keep putting the case on to boot it up. Well a year or so later the system crashed and would not boot. I opened the case, saw the broken rubber band and had a good laugh.
Ground loops can cause all kinds of weird little problems. According to the story, the magic switch was made of metal. It was most likely attached to the chasis directly, at least some small point of contact. And then it was attached to another portion of the chasis. This threw in an extra antennae, perhaps, picking up noise from a power supply or something. Perhaps just moving it imparted enough of a perturbation to cause a small electrical signal that screwed up the grounding.
Who wants to venture a guess as to whether or not people will think, hundreds of years from now, that computer errors in "ancient times" were caused by insects crawling into computers. I wonder if technology will become so entrenched and omnipresent thousands of years from now that they are all self sufficient and somewhat deific, with myths of an ancient, moth-like antagonistic god...
Taking logs...
Not computers but my days in the Navy were all about logs. Every 15 minutes. We logged, calculated and signed everything, about 50 parameters on the nuclear reactor plant control panel alone. Funny thing was I got VERY sea sick. Not a problem on a submarine when it is submerged but pure hell for me on the surface as a submarine bobs like a cork and has no windows to see the horizon for my internal reference. I would utilize a garbage bag about every 15 minutes until we hit the end of the continental shelf and could submerge which took about about 6-8 hours on the east coast, and under 2 hours on the west coast to reach. To try to limit my sickness I took motion sickness pills (they were commonly refered to as the pink pussy pills). These worked a little but limited my straight on vision. Basically I could not see things things very well that I looked at directly but could see the peripheral things. Odd situation since I was the reactor operator. The puking, lack of 100% vision and the emotional issues of knowing your leaving the world for a few months made this an interesting experience.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Mine was the time my bbs server crapped out. I popped the case top and found a moth that had made its way into the case via an empty slot and somehow got sucked into the CPU fan. Stopped the fan and overheated the CPU. Funny stuff... not.
- Jimbob
The sad part isn't the refund but the way *you* report it as a given.
Smithers, this monkey will need most of your skin...
99 little bugs in the code,
99 bugs in the code,
fix one bug, compile it again,
101 little bugs in the code.
101 little bugs in the code,....
What is your favorite computer bug story?
Still naging around, can someone please sqeeze it?
Back in the day, we had bugs the size of little bitty moths. Not these gargantuan bugs, the size of whole windows.
AND WE WERE GRATEFUL!
Back in the day, we had bugs the size of little bitty moths -- not like these modern, new-fangled, gargantuan bugs, the size of whole windows.
...and we were grateful!
...don't have bugs. They have random features.
Was the one that got into my iBook and died! That lovely, translucent shell is perfect for showcasing creepy crawlies. Ewww.
Just follow the day, and reach fo
I have been developing code for 30 years now.
Early on in my career, in the era of large decks of punch cards, I dropped a deck of cards on the floor.
I picked them up and put them back in the right order (an ugly job).
When the job was submitted and the print-out eventually returned (1 day turnaround), the compile failed. I was surprised as the deck was basically unchanged from a previous run.
I checked the output and discovered a syntax error. I then checked the card deck and discovered an insect that had gotten squished into a hole punched in a card, which changed the resultant character and caused the syntax error.
Nowadays, my bugs are all my very own.
Back to unit testing ...
Error - The operation completed successfully
feature: the worlds first moth zapper!
Otherwise he is just a moron.
Al Gore or Darl McBride?
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
... i used to work in tech support and a colleague told me this (supposedly true) story.
he got a call one day from a woman complaining her computer was doing funny things. when asked what she meant exactly she told of how when her phone rang she used to get random characters appearing on the screen. so the tech support went through the normal things trying to figure out what was wrong but to no avail.
the woman would phone back every week or so complaining that the problem was still happening, and again and again various tech support staff would go through everything they could think of with her but couldn't fix it.
one day though one of the engineers (aware of the lady and her misterious problem) happened to be over in her office fixing an unrelated problem with the ladies phone starting ringing. so as the engineer turns around to see what happens he sees the lady lean towards the phone (and this woman had BIG boobies) her chest pressing down on the keyboard as she bent over for it, and lo and behold a mess of random chars coming up on the screen.
not really a bug (not a computer one anyway) but it made me laugh.
"if i'd known it was harmless, i'd have killed it myself"
As I've been told, the math errors (long since corrected) in the Pentium chip were do to a table (?) that would have been generated by computer, had a person not insisted on the "human" touch and done the table themself.
This has got to be the most popular bug! I can't believe no one has said anything about it.
While I was away for a couple days, one of my friends messages me frantically that his PC isn't working; freezing, BSOD, etc.
A few messages later he has an explanation;
He pulled the case off to check if any of the cards were loose in their slots and to make sure fans were all spinning. Putting his fingers under the video card to check the fan, he encounters something soft/fuzzy. WTF?
He pulls out the card to find a moth seriously lodged into the video card fan (and quite dead). Thus stopping the fan and frying his vid card (GF4).
Near as he can figure, the open slot cover directly beneath the video was attractive to the moth as a nice warm dark place. It flew in only to be sucked into the vortex of the spinning video fan.
So, his video card had a bug in it.
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
Because she never listened to our warnings about attachments that say "I love you", this would happen quite often.
~~I went to battle M.C. Escher, but drew a blank...~~
I once had a RK05 disk drive that had a family of mice living in it. They built a little nest right under the card cage. Dont know if that counts...
i have very strong apathetic feelings...
...is the one about the Microsoft operating system that had no bugs in it, so some were introduced in a service pack to ensure that people would upgrade when the next version was released.
Convert RSS to HTML - integrate webfeeds into your website
...it also marks the last time a bug report contained an adequate description of the problem.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
Please stop moderating up posts saying that the term "bug" was used before September 9. Read moderation guidelines, such posts are (-1, Redundant).
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Upon opening the box, we found a mouse had been living in the box, died in the box, mumified in the box, and finally his old nest caught fire (well, maybe not on fire, but blacked it). We're not sure how long the mouse had been in there, but it was long enough to gently bake him to perfect mumification. The theory was that with all the moving going on, the mouse had gotten in through a propped open door, through an open accessory panel in the back, and made a nice nest in the warm computer. How he actually died, we're not sure. Maybe he killed himself from the misery of NT 3.5.1 because *I* sure entertained the idea.
Then there was the time we found out that the entire DNS for our networks in France was on an LCD 486 laptop, originally used to test the DNS setup, but then it never got updated at production, and had been running for about 2 years before it failed (we found it sitting on a desk in an abandoned office, the original employee long since moved on).
And probably most /.ers' least favorite:
Windows
That's gotta fit into your schema somewhere
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
Atleast back then, although the bug may still be there You could SEE it in the works AND you had the satisfaction of knowing that the computer would kill the bug even though it didn't remove it.- not like today at all.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
Case #3: Rats nests inside the computers chewing on cables etc. Big problem at one Texas co-lo. Had to replace all the ethernet cabling.
Willow Run Labs of the University of Michigan (of BOMARC / Sidewinder fame) built their DIANA analog computer (those were the days) in an old bomber-plant hanger. Room with raised floor in giant wooden building built on a slab, in a rural area.
So of course some rats got into the area under the raised floor and started chewing up the cables.
So they got a cat. And they took out a square of raised floor. Cat would go out thorugh the guard station to do his business, then come back in and dive under the floor to do his work.
This being a classified site, there was a 24-hr guard. Everybody had their badge, which was left at the guard station when out, pinned on shirt when inside.
In good military tradition (for instance ship's cats and other working or mascot animals are on the personnel roster and recieve commendations and court-martials for exceptionally good or bad behavior), the cat was taken to the security office, photographed, assigned a number, and had a badge made.
And from then on, when the cat came in he'd stop at the guard station while the guard clipped his badge on his collar before he dived under the floor, and again on the way out for the badge to be removed.
The cat seemed to have no trouble with this procedure. (No doubt because he saw that everybody else had to go through the same thing - except for doing their own badge pinning.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I was stationed in Hawaii with the 25th ID in the early '90s. We were using a Sparc IPC that had quit working and called Sun for warranty repairs. When the technician arrived, he opened the system and we found the problem(s). It appears the problem was caused by an ant colony, a tree fungus growing on the motherboard, or a short caused by the ants eating the motherboard! The technician asked how this could happen. We explained it was a tactical server which went through hell. The pedigree included: 2 deployments to Thailand, 3 deployments to Korea, 1 trip to JRTC at Fort Polk, Louisiana (where they were experimenting with a med program and had it actually save a life in the real world!), an unknown number of trips to training in the field, and it was the only data relay for the military, local, and federal Governments during the Hurricane Iniki recovery effort on Kauai. I wrote out a quick pedigree and the tech said he was going to frame the board - ant remains, fungus, and all. Explains why I like Sun Microsystems so much!
Semper BS-us! He has a wife you know...
here
Looks like the first registered case of illiterate 'geek scrawl', too.
hopper explained that this diary entry is fake. did not happen. just an early nerd-joke. get over it.
Bruno calls one day, and says his 5 1/4" floppy drive had quit working, and upon arrival I proceeded to check for a Post-It note stuck in there, etc. I cleaned it with the solution and disk kit. No Cigar...
Figuring the drive needed to be replaced, I popped the case...and was a little appalled to see some little turdlets on the floor of the box. Hmmm.
When I removed the drive, the real problem was apparent: the mouse had a taste for the tiny wires that go to the top read/write head, and had chewed all of them clean through!
The guy who sold him the box gave him a new drive, as it was a 9-pin knockout on the back that proved to be the little rodent's entrance door - and had carelessly been left uncovered, giving access to the 7-level condo that was Bruno's mini-tower.
db
Cig:
ôô
Having a cat helps solve the moth problem. I have no problems with computer bugs thanks to her. [aforementioned cat].
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
This one makes me laugh and cry:
Internet Connection Firewall and Basic Firewall Do Not Block Internet Protocol Version 6 Traffic
CAUSE
ICF in Windows XP and Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1), and ICF and Basic Firewall in Windows Server 2003, filter IPv4 traffic only.
WORKAROUND
To work around this behavior, obtain firewall software that can filter and block IPv6 traffic.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
So when did the first virus start? When somebody caught a bug?
Standing on the steet corner in downtown Charlottetown(PEI, Canada) talking to some friends and poking through an issue of Wired.
G: Look, there's a fly on the page.
D:That's a feature, not a bug.
Insanity is contagious. - Yossarian
I heard (sorry, no references) that this isn't the only such oopsie from NASA.
- One of the early rockets blew up on the pad because of a slipped decimal place. It didn't have enough thrust to support its own weight.
- One of the Mars probes had a flipped sign in the calculation of its midcourse correction, doubling the error rather than correcting it and causing it to entirely miss the vicinity of the planet.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
At Hackers (the convention) one of the attendees claimed that the first time he heard it used in the "computer cracker/vandal/data thief" sense was in a presentation to executives by a self-proclaimed computer security expert.
He was puzzled at the time by the misuse. But given that the audience was a bunch of CEOs of big companies who had never heard the correct usage (and were definitely not corrected when THEY misused it), he speculates that the misuse may have spread from there, through the business community, to the press and out into general use.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
In one word: Mel.
Goddess, that had to be one heckuva bug / feature to track down, and had I had to do it, I too would have left it in there as an inspiration to programmers everywhere.
Lemon curry?
That reminds me of two pranks from WCBN - the Campus Broadcasting Network of carrier curren radio stations in the University of Michigan dorms.
One was "silicon monodes". An engineer had visited a semiconductor plant and obtained a number of partially-assembled silicon diodes: Silicon chip on end of a wire with a bit of glass tube around it and melted down around the wire, with the other end open (to receive the other wire with the little spring to contact the far side of the chip).
The "silicon monodes" were kept in a drawer. Several of the pieces of homebrew equipment had several monodes connected to various circuit points - and duly noted with a suitable symbol in the device's circuit diagram. (I think it was either an arrow or a "T" shape on the end of a wire in a circle.)
= = = =
The other was a "station destruct" button they installed in the "combo room" - the control room where the disk jockey also ran his own mixer board.
This was during the Vietnam protests. (Note that UMich was a hotbed of anti-war activity. Both SDS and The Weathermen got started there - part of why UofM was not on the internet until quite late - despite the "fuzzballs" being designed by UofM's own "Doctor Dave" and crew.)
So the engineers started a story about how the protesters were likely to try to occupy the station. And they installed a pair of buttons on the board labeled something like "Station Destruct. Do NOT touch!", allegedly to be used in such a situation.
Of course the morning show disk jockey - whose cluelessness and mishandling of station equipment had negatively impressed said engineers - hadn't been on for more than half an hour when he hit 'em both.
A relay latched up. The monitors all over the station (including the jockey's headphones) went dead. All the lights on the board went out and the VU meter dropped to zero. 48 volts was connected across a two-watt resistor of a rather low value mounted inside the board, causing it to explode with a loud noise and a puff of acrid smoke.
Apparently the only thing still working was the ceiling light and the turntable motors. In fact the station was still on the air. But the panic of the DJ was quite a sight.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You see, the opti 895 was a chipset for a i486 processor based motherboard. The 486 processor's ZIF socket (The mdern kind with a lever, before that you had to press the procesor into a socket and hope that you aren't breaking the traces on the motherboard) had an extra row of pins to accomidate the Pentium OverDrive Processor. This processor actually put a P5 core in a motherboard designd for a i486 processor. The nifty thing was ha it worked at all.
Getting to the bug: The outer row of pins on the socket for the 486 were only power and ground for the extra power consumption for the PODP. The specs were clear which ones were Vcc and which were Vss. Well, the opti 895 had 2 of the pins backwards. This was never found in testing. Many many boards were sold from various Tiwanese manufacturers. The boards ran fin until you purchased and installed a PODP into yhe board and powered up. The chipset would short, get HOTHOTHOT, start glowing, and burst into flame within minutes.
This was bought to out (I was working for Intel as OverDrive Processor support at the time) about a week after product launch. Can you imagine how that call went?
Caller: Uhhh... I installed tha part into my computer and it burst into flames...
Tech: Yes, the speed improvement is quite impressive.
C: No, you dont understand. My computer actually caught on fire.
T: (silence)
C: Hello?
T: Am I to understand that you have a fire in your computer?
C: Yeah, the smoke is getting pretty bad.
T: You mean to tell me that it is STILL ON FIRE?
C: Well yeah, the manual says to call you with the system in the current condition.
The motherboard was sent in (we replaced the system with a new name brand machine) and the chip was redisned so that one of the pins was removed. (Pin A4, IIRC)
I have NO idea how many motherboards we ended up replacing , but I know it was a bunch, even though it wasn't Intel's fault that opti couldn't read a pinout diagram.
Both....
Back in a third-year digital systems lab, one of the exercises was to write a basic low-level printer driver in C. The printers we used were, of course, rather old tractor-fed IBM things.
Once we got to the appropriate part of the lab, we loaded the driver I had written and proceeded to run it. After ironing out a few snags, we got it semi-working -- it didn't quite initialize properly, but did seem to be able to print something. So I send it the string "Test". What appeared on the paper?
"Jesu".
I think I spent a good two hours trying to figure this one out.
In the end, after much time spent replacing cables, going through code and running a debugger to watch what the driver was doing, we figured out that the problem was actually in the printer. Somewhere in the interface port hardware in the printer, the lead for the least significant bit of the eight data bits was broken. This was causing the printer to interpret that bit as a logic '1' no matter what was sent through the cable.
The upshot is, any character which had an even ASCII value would be changed to the next character up, while characters with odd ASCII values would remain unchanged. 'e' and 's' both have odd ASCII values; 'T' and 't", however, are even, and thus were changed to 'U' and 'u', respectively. The printer, being so old and decrepit, had a problem printing 'U'; only the right-hand half of the letter was printed, not the left -- thus making it look like a 'J'.
And that's how 'Test' became 'Jesu'.
I worked for a computer animation startup (Xerxes) in Louisville in 1996. We had all SGI gear. Our database server, an R4400 based machine running IRIX 5.3 I think, was plugged into a fancy monster (I mean, for 120 volts it was monster) UPS that required a special 30 amp circuit. I ran Oracle 7.3 on that server and it was my pride and joy. Nice 9GB ultra wide SCSI drives on removable sleds, VT220 amber screen terminal on top, it was THE THING!
I come in one day and the boss is vacuuming the office. I congratulated him on his initiative until the server went down....and so did the UPS he had plugged the vacuum cleaner into.
At least we only had to replace the UPS. We had a little talk about inductive versus resistive loads and Lenz's law.
Problem description: At approximately the same time in the morning, on average about once a week, a job (different job each time) would fail with an I/O error on a specific 7-track tape drive.
It took over a year to track down the cause of this problem, which was very costly: the jobs were often time critical and mainframe computer time was costly anyway. We had top hardware CEs and systems programmers looking at this from every conceivable angle. Just about every component in the tape drive was changed.
The mystery was eventually solved by an observant computer operator. The tape drives were on the second floor of a building with a road passing just outside. At that hour in the morning, if the sun was shining, it was possible for the sun to reflect off the windscreen off passing cars and flash briefly on the read head of the tape drive. The tape drive interpreted this as invalid data.
Etymology
The term "bug" derives from hardware engineering jargon, in which it refers to errors in hardware. The term is often (but erroneously) credited to Grace Hopper, through an anecdote where she determined the reason for a malfunction on an early electromechanical computer was an actual insect stuck between the contacts of the relays that drove the device:
In 1946, when Hopper was released from active duty, she joined the Harvard Faculty at the Computation Laboratory where she continued her work on the Mark II and Mark III. She traced an error in the Mark II to a moth trapped in a relay, coining the term bug. This bug was carefully removed and taped to the log book. Stemming from the first bug, today we call errors or glitch's in a program a bug.
Despite the colourfulness of the above anecdote, it is known that the use of the word "bug" to describe defects in mechanical systems dates back to at least the 1870s. Thomas Edison, for one, used the term in his notebooks.
Studied this accident when taking computer science classes.
... Relatively shallow tissue is treated with the accelerated electrons; to reach deeper tissue, the electron beam is converted into X-ray photons."
"Some of the most widely cited software-related accidents in safety-critical systems involved a computerized radiation therapy machine called the Therac-25. Between June 1985 and January 1987, six known accidents involved massive overdoses by the Therac-25 -- with resultant deaths and serious injuries. They have been described as the worst series of radiation accidents in the 35-year history of medical accelerators."
Software controlling this: "Medical linear accelerators (linacs) accelerate electrons to create high- energy beams that can destroy tumors with minimal impact on the surrounding healthy tissue.
Short version, with links to longer version - http://www.uoguelph.ca/~meby/
Beware of the Redittor who loans you a Sharpie.
During the industrial year of my degree (mumble) years ago, my first task was to modify a Fortran 77 engineering program which calculated intersection points between two pipes, so the correct cuts could be made and the pipes joined. We're talking big pipes here - the company built the Syney Harbour Bridge and the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank building in Hong Kong.
Lacking the modern tools we all love, debugging tended to be done by printing values at pertinent points. When the code was correct, I removed them all... and it broke; I put them back in and it worked; commented them out and it still worked; deleted the comments... and it broke again! These were basic, fundamental print statements, no fancy function calls with side effects. I eventually ended up with two 100+ page listings of the object code (working and non-working) side by side on the floor and had to compare the lot by hand until I found the difference, near the bottom of course!
It turned out to be a bug in the PDP Fortran compiler. It was incorrectly generating two identical labels in the same code block, but for whatever reason they were together in the working version and had a register being reset to zero between them in the broken version - the JMP was going to the second and therefore not resetting the register.
As an undergraduate at the time, I was in despair... my first 'real' job and I couldn't fix a simple program - little did I know what the final cause would be - nearly put me off software development for life! Bloody DEC and their shonky compiler, they didn't even give the company a free upgrade when the fix came out!
Go permanent? In your dreams and my worst nightmares.
In the fact that the video links are in quicktime format?
The movie Pi does show something like this ... a bug trapped inside Max Cohens "Super Computer"
faith in chaos !!!
While working at Radio Shack (Yeah, I know, thank you Simpsons) a eldely woman brought in her compaq PC which I sold her. Irrate (Just like they all are) she told me that it was making a ticking sound that she just coulden't stop. We should have sent it to depot, but I'm freindly so I testied it in the back. No fault found. Determined she continued complaining. Ect, ect, ect... turned out to be the clock on her wall at home.
how about the graphological differences? I am not an expert, but read some book (some 20 years ago ...) about graphology. It seems to me, that the sentence "first actual bug ..." is of a newer date.
...which of course is any bug which bings the whole system down in a flaming heap!
I recall playing an early version of Flight Simulator on an Apple ][. The best strategy was to fly over the mountains, taxi back through them, roll slowly over the oil well and drop your bomb at zero altitude.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.