zweig@cs.uiuc.edu (Johnny Zweig) (01/08/91)
I have heard, along with most people who have ever heard anything about FORTRAN, about the bug of the form: DO 10 I = 1. 100 (which parses to assigning one and one tenth to the real valued variable DO10I) which supposedly caused a spacecraft to go crazy. Then there was the great AT&T outage. Does anyone know of a compendium of such real life problems caused by computer (particularly software) bugs? If there is not one, I volunteer to start collecting them (send e-mail to me with the subject: BUG LOSSAGE: <mumble>). I would particularly like to see a cleverly cross-indexed book so that I could, say, look up FORTRAN, TYPO, SPACECRAFT or PARSING -- UNEXPECTED and get the bug report mentioned above. I think such a work would be invaluable to people writing articles on software engineering/reliability so that they could give examples of lossage due to problems they are trying to solve. -Johnny Bug