Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!hplabs!hp-pcd!hpvcfs1!johne
From: johne@hpvcfs1.HP.COM (John Eaton)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Saturn V Launcher (WAS: "big endian" and "little endian" - first usage for computer)
Message-ID: <1080001@hpvcfs1.HP.COM>
Date: 13 Jan 89 20:11:32 GMT
References: <6891@june.cs.washington.edu>
Organization: Hewlett Packard, Vancouver, WA
Lines: 22

<<<<<<<
<
<  It may be that the person who made the keypunch
< error (the hyphen for minus theory sounds reasonable) was fired, but
< the summary reports I found indicated that the spacecraft loss was
< accepted as part of the cost of space exploration.
----------
I would hope that they had more sense than to fire the keypuncher when the
fault was actually the system designers. Keypunching was known to be an
error prone operation especially when dealing with certain ambigious characters
in someones handwriting. As a minimum they should of had a second operator
do a VERIFY operation on the same stack. Even with that if there was 1 chance
in 10,000 that an operator would make a mistake then you still had 1 chance in
100,000,000 that both would make the same mistake and missile go boom. That is
an order of magnitude worse than todays typical floppy disc drives and yet
nobody would consider designing a floppy disc system without error detection
that would catch those errors. Perhaps it was an early lesson in fault tolerant
computing.

John Eaton
!hpvcfs1!johne