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Java Developers (for the desktop)
Colt: The original point and click interface. --Unknown
Reminders "don't change anything until the problem is obvious" --Sean Anderson On July 1-2, 1991, computer-software collapses in telephone switching stations disrupted service in Washington DC, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Once again, seemingly minor maintenance problems had crippled the digital System 7. About twelve million people were affected in the crash of July 1, 1991. Said the New York Times Service: "Telephone company executives and federal regulators said they were not ruling out the possibility of sabotage by computer hackers, but most seemed to think the problems stemmed from some unknown defect in the software running the networks." Within the week, a red-faced software company, DSC Communications Corporation of Plano, Texas, owned up to glitches in the signal transfer point software that DSC had designed for Bell Atlantic and Pacific Bell. The immediate cause of the July 1 crash was a single mistyped character: one tiny typographical flaw in one single line of the software. One mistyped letter, in one single line, had deprived the nations capital of phone service. It was not particularly surprising that this tiny flaw had escaped attention: a typical System 7 station requires ten million lines of code. From The Hacker Crackdown, by Bruce Sterling, 1992.-- website ************************************************************************** The first operational launch attempt of the space shuttle, whose real-time operating software consists of about 500,000 lines of code, failed because of a synchronization problem among its flight-control computers. The software error responsible for the failure, which was itself introduced when another error was fixed two years earlier, would have revealed itself, on the average, once in 67 times. From "The development of software for ballistic-missile defense," by H. Lin, Scientific American, vol. 253, no. 6 (Dec. 1985), p. 52. -- website
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