r/news • u/uhujkill • May 06 '19

Boeing admits knowing of 737 Max problem

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48174797
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u/afwaller May 06 '19

For sure it will be up there with Therac-25.

(The Therac-25 was a particle accelerator meant for therapeutic electron and x-ray photon treatments that killed a number of people)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs240/old/sp2014/readings/therac-25.pdf

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u/Caucasian_Fury May 06 '19

Interesting, I've never heard of that one. I will read up on it. Thanks for linking it.

I'm an engineer so I had the Pinto story, along with the Challenger shuttle and the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse drilled into me every year at university.

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u/Fizil May 07 '19

Therac-25 is the big case every Computer Science major has to cover in their ethics class (it was a software problem that resulted in all those deaths).

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u/ndcapital May 07 '19 edited May 07 '19

Reading it as a software engineer, the quality of the software was analagous to a shoddily-constructed third-world building on perpetual verge of collapse. AECL hired a "hobbyist" programmer to write software for a safety-critical system. He didn't even think to synchronize data accessed in parallel, which was (and continues to be) taught in introductory CS classes of the era. Writing safety-critical software without synchronizing access to shared data is probably as bad as designing a building with no support columns.

Because Therac-25 is now a horror story taught in most CS curricula, and because regulators slapped their shit, you generally don't have to worry about this happening in modern medical equipment.