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The table-position system was the first implicated in Therac-25's failures; the manufacturer revised it with redundant switches to cross-check their operation. The software set a flag variable by incrementing it, rather than by setting it to a fixed non-zero value.
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 ...
That document is part of An Investigation of the Therac-25 Accidents, published in IEEE Computer, Vol. 26, No. 7, July 1993, pp. 18-41. This is a quite often-cited paper and is used as an example in many university CS courses. According to Google Scholar, this paper has 551 known citations-- intgr 12:45, 15 October 2009 (UTC)
Race conditions were among the flaws in the Therac-25 radiation therapy machine, which led to the death of at least three patients and injuries to several more. [18] Another example is the energy management system provided by GE Energy and used by Ohio-based FirstEnergy Corp (among other power facilities). A race condition existed in the alarm ...
Electron beams impinging on metal produce X-rays. The X-rays may be diagnostic, e.g., dental or limb images. Often in these X-ray tubes the metal is a spinning disk so that it doesn't melt; the disk is spun in vacuum via a magnetic motor. The X-rays may also be used to kill cancerous tissue. The Therac-25 machine is an infamous example of this.
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There are exceptions, such as the Therac-25 accidents and the 1958 Cecil Kelley criticality accident, where the absorbed doses in Gy or rad are the only useful quantities, because of the targeted nature of the exposure to the body. Radiotherapy treatments are typically prescribed in terms of the local absorbed dose, which might be 60 Gy or higher.
The nuclear weapons tests of the Soviet Union were performed between 1949 and 1990 as part of the nuclear arms race.The Soviet Union conducted 715 nuclear tests using 969 total devices by official count, including 219 atmospheric, underwater, and space tests and 124 peaceful use tests. [1]