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The first prototype of the Therac-25 was built in 1976 and was put on the market in late 1982. The software for the Therac-25 was developed by one person over several years using PDP-11 assembly language. It was an evolution of the Therac-6 software. In 1986, the programmer left AECL.
Software bugs in the Therac-25 radiation therapy machine were directly responsible for patient deaths in the 1980s. [ 4 ] In 1996, the European Space Agency 's US$1 billion prototype Ariane 5 rocket was destroyed less than a minute after launch due to a bug in the on-board guidance computer program.
The DAO bug. On June 17, 2016, the DAO was subjected to an attack exploiting a combination of vulnerabilities, including the one concerning recursive calls, that resulted in the transfer of 3.6 million Ether – around a third of the 11.5 million Ether that had been committed to The DAO – valued at the time at around $50M.
A related cause of accidents is failure of control software, as in the cases involving the Therac-25 medical radiotherapy equipment: the elimination of a hardware safety interlock in a new design model exposed a previously undetected bug in the control software, which could have led to patients receiving massive overdoses under a specific set ...
Software errors can cause human fatalities (see for example: List of software bugs). The causes have ranged from poorly designed user interfaces to direct programming errors, [19] [20] [21] see for example Boeing 737 case or Unintended acceleration cases [22] [23] or Therac-25 cases. [24]
There have been numerous criticality accidents dating back to atomic testing during World War II, while computer-controlled radiation therapy machines such as Therac-25 played a major part in radiotherapy accidents. The latter of the two is caused by the failure of equipment software used to monitor the radiational dose given.
Between 1985 and 1987, a series of design flaws in AECL's Therac-25 medical accelerator caused massive overdoses of radiation [18] on 6 different occasions, resulting in five deaths. In 1987 the machine was found defective by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and eventually recalled by AECL despite their multiple denials that the problems ...
The most famous of these failures are the Therac-25 incidents. [15] Peter G. Neumann has kept a contemporary list of software problems and disasters. [16] The software crisis has been fading from view, because it is psychologically extremely difficult to remain in crisis mode for a protracted period (more than 20 years).