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The Big Technical Mistakes of History
An anonymous reader tips a PC Authority review of some of the biggest technical goofs of all time. "As any computer programmer will tell you, some of the most confusing and complex issues can stem from the simplest of errors. This article looking back at history's big technical mistakes includes some interesting trivia, such as NASA's failure to convert measurements to metric, resulting in the Mars Climate Orbiter being torn apart by the Martian atmosphere. Then there is the infamous Intel Pentium floating point fiasco, which cost the company $450m in direct costs, a battering on the world's stock exchanges, and a huge black mark on its reputation. Also on the list is Iridium, the global satellite phone network that promised to make phones work anywhere on the planet, but required 77 satellites to be launched into space."
Rim shot...!
No sig today...
There was no technical flaw in Iridium. It was stated what it would do. It did it. Someone screwed up the business plan, but there was no technical mistake. They knew it took 77 satellites for what they wanted. And they launched them all and they worked flawlessly. Now, if only they had sales to match the business plan, they'd be billionaires. But again, unrelated to any technical issue.
Learn to love Alaska
... and you still use it to do rocket science?
When I saw the title, I immediately imagined the Maginot line. Thousands more examples could come to mind.
Could somebody please explain to the author of the articles that Technology is more than computers/gadjets and older than 10 years? It is an epic history that goes along with mankind.
What, no Capacitor Plague? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
Have to disagree to a point. The PS/2 range sold big time in the business/corporate and education worlds (at least in the UK until RM/Viglen got their toe in the door). Built like tanks, yes - but they were very reliable in my experience.
The biggest failing within the PS/2 world was the licencing arrangements for the MCA (microchannel architecture) bus which made it expensive for other manufacturers to use and so few did. MCA was technically great, but the way IBM brought it to market ended up with is getting the EISA bus and the goddam awful VESA Local Bus (VLB), whose cards were so long that they frequently popped out of their connectors if the motherboard was flexed or warped due to heat and poor mounting. I recall that one quick fix for VESA problems was to roll the empty tube of a plastic Bic pen under the back edge of a warping motherboard to stop it drooping too much.
AT&ROFLMAO
Seriously, we have got to stop with the hyperbole before our children don't know the difference between a War on Drugs and a War in Iraq.
We we say of all time, I think of things like lead plumbing in Rome, or the suspension bridge that got tore apart by a mere breeze.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning#History
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3932185696812733207#
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
The problem Intel had with the FDIV bug was one of PR. The Pentium range was the first CPU family to be directly marketed to the general public in a big way.
While anyone with knowledge of the chip design and production processes understood that such bugs are not particularly uncommon (many much simpler chips have well documented errata and workarounds for unintentional behaviour, like the 286's "gate A20" bug that actually turned out to be useful) the general public and the popular press had no such understanding so were very surprised - they assumed that all CPUs were (or should be) completely 100% perfect and therefore taking issue with what they saw as being sold defective goods.
Before the first generation Pentium FDIV issue, such relatively minor problems were dealt with by the error, including any extra side-effects and possible workarounds, being documented, those errata being sent to the chip makers customers and relevant software developers, and things would get patched up without the general public ever being aware there was an issue in the first place aside perhaps from a small number of users who by shear chance were noticeably affected by the one-in-a-few-billion problem before their software was patched (those people would be given replacement chips and/or other recompense). A costly replacement program simply wouldn't have been needed in this case.
Maybe NASA wouldn't have made that mistake, but the sub-contractor could. OTOH, maybe the sub-contractor had a button to pass from Imperial to Metric units for its navigational controls, but maybe NASA didn't RTFM, and that may have caused the mistake.
One lesson though: Always use metric in science stuff. Understood NASA?
The lack of authentication before forwarding/sending mail has to be one of the biggest issues today. If only the original designers of the software would have thought ahead and verified the sender of the message was legit and that the mail came from the domain specified before blindly sending it along.
Intel's 8086 CPU, Intel's first 16-bit processor, was possibly much worse than any of those mentioned because it affected all of us. Intel chose to continue the quirkiness of the 8008 rather than abandon it.
... and was therefore fairly awkward (and remained so until the 80386)."
Just before the time of the introduction of the 8086 I knew a chief of technology of a high-tech company who was waiting for the 8086 as though it were a combination of Christmas, his birthday, and the birth of his child. He would start every conversation by telling everyone Intel's release date for the 8086.
The day of its release, he was miserably unhappy. Intel chose to continue an architecture that made assembly language programming and debugging of high-level languages more difficult.
Wikipedia says about the 8086: "Marketed as source compatible, the 8086 was designed so that assembly language for the 8008, 8080, or 8085 could be automatically converted into equivalent (sub-optimal) 8086 source code, with little or no hand-editing. The programming model and instruction set was (loosely) based on the 8080 in order to make this possible. However, the 8086 design was expanded to support full 16-bit processing, instead of the fairly basic 16-bit capabilities of the 8080/8085."
The problem was that the quirkiness has been extended to the 32-bit processors of today. The Wikipedia article says, "The legacy of the 8086 is enduring in the basic instruction set of today's personal computers and servers..."
And, "Programming over 64 KB boundaries involved adjusting segment registers
Everyone on the planet who used or were affected by computers then suffered because the debugging was much more complicated than if Intel had chosen to make the operation of the 8086 simpler.
"Such relatively simple and low-power 8086-compatible processors in CMOS are still used in embedded systems."
Sigh. Even if he's 16, if you're writing a piece on tech mistakes you oughta suspect that they couldn't possibly have used an "Internet Bulletin Board Site" in 1986, so maybe you got the acronym wrong.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
Though wasn't the issue in case of Pentium FDIV bug specifically that Intel didn't publish the errata or...any other information after Intel researchers discovered the error? It took one independent one, to whom Intel didn't even respond initially...
One that hath name thou can not otter
Close, but the real problem is the electoral college that pretty much ensures that any vote NOT for one of the two major-party candidates is a wasted vote.
We don't technically have a two-party system, we have an election system that is rigged such that only two of the parties count.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
FTFA:
It turned out that while most of the programming and mission planning had been done in units of measurement from the Imperial system used in the US, the software to control the orbiter's thrusters had been written with units of measurement from the metric system.
And that is WRONG! It was the software that had the archaic units, and the rest of the spaceship was built with international units.
The software was working in pounds force, while the spacecraft expected figures in newtons; 1 pound force equals approximately 4.45 newtons.
The software had been adapted from use on the earlier Mars Climate Orbiter, and was not adequately tested before launch.
I did not read the rest of that article, since they're not fact-checking their mocking of people's inability to double-check things.
You can't take the sky from me...
Believing in some unseen entity who supposedly created existence, and basing all societal calculations on that. That has to be the mother of all errors.