One little line of code can cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
1+1 =3
On September 9, 1947, at 3:45 p.m., Grace Murray Hopper (an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral) records ‘the first computer bug’ in the Harvard Mark II computer’s log-book. She wrote: “First actual case of bug being found.”
Not making any mistakes in this field can be complicated, Luckily, not all mistakes are so expensive. In this summarize list, I have collected some of the errors that have always caught my attention.
Index:
1. The Explosion of the Ariane 5.
2. PayPal accidentally credits man $92 quadrillion.
3. Windows Calculator Bug.
4. The Metric System and NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter.
5. The $475 Pentium FDIV bug.
6. Y2K Bug (1999).
7. The year 2038 problem.
8. Patriot Missile Failure (1991).
9. Gangnam Style music video ‘broke’ YouTube.
10. BSOD during the Windows 98 presentation.
11. Bonus: Because not everything is a software bug.
The Explosion of the Ariane 5
A rocket about to take off
On June 4, 1996, an Ariane 5 rocket launched by the ESA (European Space Agency) exploded just forty seconds after its launch from Kourou in the French Guiana. The rocket was on its inaugural voyage, after a decade of development costing $8 billion and the result of this bug was the loss of $370 million.
The reason behind its failure was an integer Overflow, which is a widespread bug in computer programming. In this case, an attempt was made to set a 64-bit number in 16-bit space.
PayPal accidentally credits man $92 quadrillion
A lot of dollar bills
When Chris Reynolds opened his PayPal e-mail statement, the Pennsylvania PR executive’s account balance was $92,233,720,368,547,800.
The amount is significant in the world of 64-bit numbers suggesting a programming error. The error was quickly recognized, and his account had returned to zero by the time he had logged in.
PayPal offered to give an unspecified amount of money to a cause of Reynolds’ choice.
Windows Calculator Bug
Calculator
This bug exists in most Windows versions(except in Windows 10), including Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows 8. You can check it in your OS if you have one of these versions.
Steps: Open Windows Calculator, type 4, and take the square root, you will get two then subtract two from it. Instead of result zero, you will see different outputs on different versions of windows.
The cause for the bug is the way calculator manages sqrt operations. The results are saved as floating-point numbers instead of integers, and the precision errors when it comes to floating-point calculations are the result that you can see.
Microsoft acknowledged this bug in the calculator app, and they fixed it in Windows 10 Build 17639.
The Metric System and NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter
Orbiter spaceship
The Mars Climate Orbiter, built at the cost of $125 million, was a 338-kilogram space robot launched on December 11, 1998, to study the Martian atmosphere, climate and to act as the communications relay in the Mars Surveyor ’98 program for the Mars Polar Lander.
When the robot was about to enter the planet orbit, the communication was cut, and the orbiter entered the Mars atmosphere at a wrong angle rather than entering the planets orbit. The reason was that the navigation team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) used the metric system in its calculations because Lockheed Martin in Denver provided crucial acceleration data in the Imperial system, and the different metrics came into conflict with each other.
The $475 Pentium FDIV bug
Cpu chip
The bug was discovered by a professor of mathematics, Thomas Nicely, in 1994. This mistake is a hardware bug affecting to the floating-point unit of the first Intel Pentium processors. Because of the bug, the processor might return incorrect binary floating-point results when dividing a number. Intel attributed the failure to missing entries in the lookup table used by the floating-point division circuits.
Not all the processors had this failure, but around 5 million defective chips were detected, and Intel accepted at the beginning to replace the chip only if the customers could prove they were impacted by faulty chips. Still, later the company replaced the chips to anyone who complained, and the resulting cost was $475 million for Intel.
Y2K Bug (1999)
Party to celebrate the year 2000
The Millennium bug or Y2K refers to events related to the storage and formatting of calendar data beginning in the year 2000. Problems were predicted because many programs represented four-digit years with only the final two digits, making the year 2000 indistinguishable from 1900.
It affected, for example, to banks that calculate interest rates daily, centers such as nuclear power plants, hospitals, transportation, and a lot of things. Billions of dollars were spent around the world to upgrade computer systems and correct this error.
The year 2038 problem
Code screen
The year 2038 or Y2038 bug is caused by 32-bit processors and the limitations of the 32-bit systems.
Basically, when the year 2038 strikes 03:14:07 UTC on January 19, computers that are still using 32-bit systems to manage the date and time won’t be able to handle this change. Similar to the Y2K bug, the computers won’t be able to tell the difference between the year 2038 and 1970.
Nevertheless, almost all modern processors in desktop computers are now made as 64-bit systems running 64-bit software, and in 2038 it is difficult that 32-bit systems exist.
Patriot Missile Failure (1991)
Soldiers boarding a plane
On February 25, 1991, while the Gulf War, a Patriot Missile battery in Saudi Arabia failed to trace and intercept an incoming Iraqi Scud missile. The scud missile hit an American Army barracks, killing 28 soldiers and injuring around another 100 people.
The problem was an inaccurate calculation of the time since boot due to computer arithmetic errors. Precisely, the time in tenths of second, as measured by the system’s internal clock was multiplied by 1/10 to return the time in seconds, it calculated the incorrect time, and the missile failed to intercept the Iraqi Scud missile attack. Again another rounding error in the system.
Gangnam Style music video ‘broke’ YouTube
Youtube app
YouTube’s counter before used a 32-bit integer, which is a unit used to represent data in computer architecture. This 32-bit integer determines the maximum possible views it could count was 2,147,483,647.
The Gangnam Style video exceeded the maximum value, and we got the below famous Gangnam Style YouTube bug.
Nowadays, YouTube uses a 64-bit integer for its video counter, which means videos have a maximum viewer count of 9.22 quintillion.
BSOD during the windows 98 presentation
Blue screen of death
The BSOD or “Blue screen of death” is a blue color error screen displayed on Windows systems following a fatal system error. It shows a system crash, in which the OS has reached a state where it can no longer operate reliably. This is caused by several different problems, such as a crucial process terminating unexpected or a general hardware failure.
In Windows 98 or Windows 95, a BSoD occurs when the system attempts to access the file “c:\aux\aux “ or “ c:\con\con “ on the hard drive.
On March 16, 2000, Microsoft released a security update to fix this issue.
Windows 98 presentation
Tesla’s Cybertruck broken-window.
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Tesla’s Cybertruck presentation
Conclusion
After reading this, I’m sure that when you commit a Bug, you won’t feel so bad. We are human, and sometimes we make mistakes. But be careful!, A simple line of misspelled code can cost hundreds of millions of dollars.