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The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

thedailywtf.com

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Re: The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

#161

Post by herval »

franktankbank wrote: post #127
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for a company that manufactured some of the highest-Quality photographic and scientific equipment that you can buy. It was expensive as hell, but our customers seemed to think it was worth it. > It's the end result of a process In my experience, it's even more than that. It's a culture .

A culture of high-quality engineering, no doubt. Made up of: high quality engineers!

you don't need "high quality engineers" to have high-quality outputs. And vice-versa - lots of places with very high quality engineers produce terribly low-quality software

Re: The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

#162

Post by emchammer »

Liquix wrote: post #152
skinwill wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around here we have Epic. If you want a good scare, look up their corporate Willy Wonka-esq jail/campus and their policy of zero remote work.

I thought "Willy Wonka-esque" was tongue in cheek, but they have a yellow brick road leading up to the front door... absolutely bizarre Those who want to escape the office altogether, can hop on one of the company’s 600 cow-print bikes to take meetings from a treehouse, slide down a rabbit hole or grab lunch in a train car. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/01/inside-epic-systems-mythical...

They don’t seem to call themselves a family. That’s a plus.

Re: The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

#163

Post by slavik81 »

Tenemo wrote: post #105

The full 1993 report linked in the article has an intetesting statement regarding software developer certfication in the "Lessons learned" chapter: > Taking a couple of programming courses or programming a home computer does not qualify anyone to produce safety-critical software. Although certification of software engineers is not yet required, more events like those associated with the Therac-25 will make such certi…

I am a licensed professional software engineer in Canada. It's been fifteen years since I first registered with my professional association, but I will probably not be renewing my license this year as it's not providing any real benefit to my career.

Two decades ago there was a lot of talk about turning software development into a structured engineering discipline, but that plan seems to have largely been abandoned.

Re: The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

#164

Post by remyporter »

greatgib wrote: post #60
mellosouls wrote: post #24

TIL TheDailyWTF is still active. I'd thought it had settled to greatest hits only some years ago.

This story is kind of old. But also I'm suspicious that this was an AI generated content due to this weird paragraph (one becoming "they"): It's worth noting that there was one developer who wrote all of this code. They left AECL in 1986, and thankfully for them, no one has ever revealed their identity. And while it may be tempting to lay the blame at their feet—they made every technical choice, they coded every bug—…

I’ve been writing on the Internet since very early days, and have put almost twenty years into The Daily Wtf specifically. Which means I’m actually over represented in the training set. I don’t write like AI. AI writes like me.

Re: The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

#165

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #138
anonymars wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that exactly the opposite of the point being made? > software quality doesn't appear because you have good developers

Not really. Good developers are a necessary ingredient of a much larger recipe. People think that a good process means you can toss in crap developers, or that great developers mean that you can have a bad process. In my experience, I worked for a 100-year-old Japanese engineering company that had a decades-long culture of Quality. People stayed at that company for their entire career, and most of them were top-shelf…

It really is funny how any discussion of improving software quality becomes unpopular, here.

Re: The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

#166

Post by SirMaster »

The question I have is why was the hardware capable of delivering a fatal dose like this. Is that actually ever even a usable output for some legitimate reason?

If not, why not hardware limit the power input to the machine, so even if the software completely failed, it would not be physically capable of delivering a fatal dose like this?

Re: The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

#167

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

herval wrote: post #161
franktankbank wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A culture of high-quality engineering, no doubt. Made up of: high quality engineers!

you don't need "high quality engineers" to have high-quality outputs. And vice-versa - lots of places with very high quality engineers produce terribly low-quality software

I guess we see things differently.

They don't need to be especially talented engineers, but, in my experience (and I actually have quite a bit of it, in this area), they need to be dedicated to a culture of Quality.

And it is entirely possible for very talented engineers to produce shite. I've seen exactly that.

Re: The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

#169

Post by ozim »

pjmlp wrote: post #132
ozim wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey don’t blame developers. It is business who requests features ASAP to cut costs and and then there are customers who don’t want to pay for „ideal software” but rather have every software for free. Most devs and QA workers I know want to deliver best quality software and usually are gold plating stuff anyway.

Being a real Software Engineer, those that actually have the proper title, eventually with the final examination, means being able to deliver the best product within the set of given constraints. Also, speaking out when the train is visibly going against a wall.

You mean like those in the article:

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/27/us/alaska-f-35-crash-acci...

Re: The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

#170

Post by PokestarFan »

SirMaster wrote: post #166

The question I have is why was the hardware capable of delivering a fatal dose like this. Is that actually ever even a usable output for some legitimate reason? If not, why not hardware limit the power input to the machine, so even if the software completely failed, it would not be physically capable of delivering a fatal dose like this?

I believe that for X-ray mode, the radiation was indirect, so it needed a lot more power. Furthermore, older revisions had hardware locks, and the intent of the Therac-25 was to make it cheaper.
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