Fatal Defect: Chasing Killer Computer Bugs

by Ivars Peterson

An airplane crashes, killing eighty-seven passengers. A cancer patient receives a fatal dose of radiation from a machine designed to be foolproof. The ATMs at a New York bank debit customers twice their actual withdrawals, resulting in a loss of millions of dollars. In every case, the culprit was a computer bug, a software error or design defect that may escape detection until it erupts into the real world with sometimes catastrophic results.

This arresting and at times terrifying book tells us just how prevalent these defects are and how they are multiplying as computers become more sophisticated and more deeply embedded in our daily lives. It is also a riveting portrait of the men and women who find and "exterminate" those bugs, whether they occur in pocket calculators or nuclear reactors.

Fatal Defect reveals what you should know about the computers in our lives. Read it before you buy a computer, use a cash machine, or book an airplane flight. Then pray that one of its real-life heroes was on the job.

Genres: Computers, Nonfiction, History, Technology

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wanted more horror stories

Bugs in code that caused disasters. But spent very little time on interesting bugs. Never got in depth, doesn't retell any tales (was hoping for something a little more like Cuckoo's Egg), don’t get to know any 'characters.' Spent a lot of time on whether you can prove software works 100% correctly (you can't).

[Ushan · Rating 2 out of 5]

The stories of many famous software bugs and bug-prone systems: the Therac-25 radiation machine that killed patients, the crash-prone Airbus, the Patriot missile battery that missed Iraqi SCUDs because of an insufficiently accurate internal clock. Computer safety expert Nancy Leveson is quoted many times; I took her class in 1998 (and told her of the most bizarre bug I had introduced up to then) and recommend her book Safeware over this one. One small correction: Velvel is not a childhood nickname of William Kahan, but simply the Yiddish variant of his name.

[Mark Bates · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is more software engineering oriented than software bug stories. Good insight, a little dated.

[Nilendu Misra · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quite dated.

[Danny Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ivars Peterson quickly guides us through what was painstaking drudgery to discover the tiny errors costing lives, lots of money and confidence in trusted systems. We see how bright and hard-working people make deadly mistakes. He takes us to the door of the consortium, of which he is a member, that for years has struggled with the sticky problem of debugging code before the bugs bring down a system. Entertaining and frightening because it is true. Take it from the expert.

[Alejandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just as other reviewers, I was expecting more detailed anecdotes. It's still an interesting read, but I guess the title of the book is misleading.