Foone🏳️⚧️
I listened to a podcast about the Therac-25 disaster ( where a malfunctioning radiotherapy machine injured several patients ) and I learned the funniest element of this whole situation:
at one point the company that made the thing issued directions on how to work around the error: They told the hospitals to go to their PDP-11 terminals, and remove the "up" key from the keyboards.
Foone🏳️⚧️
that podcast is here:
Foone🏳️⚧️
@mattbee partially! it avoided one of the major bugs, since users could no longer operate the user interface fast enough to trigger the race condition
Matthew Bloch
@foone wait, but did that work?
Foone🏳️⚧️
@santiago_v @mattbee well hopefully you were removing the key NOT during the 8 seconds when the control mechanism was rotating, which was the problem
Santiago V
@mattbee @foone i guess it did unless you accidentaly pressed the key when you were trying to remove it
Dan Ports
@foone @mattbee you can try it with this curses-based Therac UI simulator my friend wrote for an April Fools' joke for a class we were teaching years ago: http://web.mit.edu/6.033/2007/wwwdocs/assignments/handson-therac.html
...which I've just learned that Wikipedia has been hosting a screenshot of as the *actual* Therac interface for some time: https://discuss.systems/@dan/112045641217379517
Foone🏳️⚧️
@dan @mattbee that's great!
the podcast I watched thought that was real, too.
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