Comments on: The 10 greatest catastrophes caused by PC carelessness

By: grenoble

grenoble — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 10:28:37 +0000

Quality read. I found your blog on google and i have your page saved on my favorite read list!
I’m a fan of your blog. Keep up the good work

By: internet marketing

internet marketing — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 11:31:18 +0000

I learnt about that radiotherapy machine while doing a course on safety critical systems at uni. Apparently they only hired one guy to program the software, and only he could understand the source code. However, the guy vanished.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 01:38:16 +0000

I’m surprised you left out the Patriot Missile Failure, where a rounding-error caused the death of 28 soldiers.

By: ShadeDragon

ShadeDragon — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 09:07:25 +0000

Find it kinda silly how number 5 is a problem that caused numerous deaths and most likely heavy monetary damage, while most of the ones below it are just monetary damage. You’d think people lives would have a better value…

By: David

David — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 22:27:38 +0000

I fell the worst error was Bell’s System 7 phone switching station, which caused telephone lines to be cut throughout America, this then leads onto ‘Operation Sun Devil’.
-The Hacker Crackdown, worth reading. I should probably re-read it :)

By: Randomguy

Randomguy — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 02:59:47 +0000

the only thing that made this better for me was the fact at the end of the list when i finished reading it was an ad “reinstall XP”

By: victor sux cox

victor sux cox — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 06:01:04 +0000

Fuck you victor you ignorant piece of shit!

By: victor

victor — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 22:12:33 +0000

lazy ass people letting computers do all the work.

By: Diamond

Diamond — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 20:25:44 +0000

haha at pepsi! I dont know how the manufacturing works at a place like that but you would think that at least one person would have caught on to the problem – at least some people got the $ they said should have won

By: Barnegat Blummis

Barnegat Blummis — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:51:44 +0000

I had a secretary once who, it turned out, was a major whack job. Like many half-crazed people, she was adept at hiding it and all seemed to be going well for several months. Remember, this was years ago and computers had 20-50 gigabyte hard drives and still had floppy disks. I regularly did a backup of all my data onto floppies (they hadn’t come out with all the large storage mediums then) and it came to 54 floppy disks.

One day, I came into the office and she informed me with an odd smile, “I made a mistake and erased your client databases! I’m so sorry.”

I said that it wasn’t a problem since we had a full backup.

“Oh, she replied with that same odd grin, “I also accidentally erased all of those, too.”

That was the beginning of a long slide into near bankruptcy since I had no other copies of that database which represented years and years of work for clients all over the world.

Of course I fired her on the spot, but the damage was done. That’s MY biggest disaster, for which I’m still paying.