Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!julius.cs.uiuc.edu!zweig
From: zweig@cs.uiuc.edu (Johnny Zweig)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Real-Life lossage due to bugs
Message-ID: <1991Jan7.211708.28285@julius.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 7 Jan 91 21:17:08 GMT
Sender: news@julius.cs.uiuc.edu (USENet News)
Reply-To: zweig@cs.uiuc.edu
Organization: U of Illinois, Dept. of Computer Science, Systems Research Group
Lines: 19

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