Reminds me of the (alleged) reason why first Soviet Mars missions missed the planet - there was an erroneous period instead of a comma at some part of its nav program written in Fortran.
Reminds me of the (confirmed) reason why US mission http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter hit the planet at the wrong angle and desintegrated in the atmosphere - there was a mix-up in imperial and SI units.
According to Expert C Programming : Deep C Secrets by Peter Van Der Linden page 61:
'Table 2-2 The Truth About Two Famous Space Software Failures
WHEN MISSION ERROR RESULT CAUSE
Summer 1961 Mercury . used instead of , nothing; error found before flight Flaw in Fortran language
July 22, 1962 Mariner 1 "R" instead of "R̅" $12M rocket and probe destroyed programmer followed error
(to Venus) written in specification in specification'
I have no idea whether the formatting of this table will be preserved, its inclusion is to save you looking for the book, you could either download the following .pdf and search for 'mariner' due to the lack of page numbers
I have never heard that was software related, but it also is a decent bet software was involved, e.g. for stiffening the suspension. What top of the line car did not have software, in 1997?
To have software involved with the suspension requires an active suspension, which was rare in 1997. Mercedes added an electronic stability system only after the Moose test failed, so I don't think it was a software problem in the first place (rather software fixed the problem).
That's the one, bingo. It was a new line of smaller MBs, so I misremembered it being Smart. The issue though was most certainly with the software overcompensating the roll in the wrong direction. I would've not remembered it otherwise :)
The A class didn't have active suspension. I believe it was a mechanical issue and solved with a stiffer front anti-roll bar and other suspension geometry tweak. Though there is a possibility the ESP was tweaked to apply the brake under such circumstances I think that could do more harm than good. I could be wrong, it was 1997..
IIRC the non-ESP MB Sprinter also had stability issues.
I don't know if it is just a mis-telling of the F-22 bug (I suspect it may be), but I have heard of a bug in the autopilot software of some fighter plane that would cause the plane to flip upsidedown when it was south of the equator on autopilot. Presumably this bug was discovered during simulations, and was never actually accidentally triggered in the wild.
There was a very expensive stock-trade mistake when someone issued a sell order, typing 'b' instead of 'm' for 'million'. Market dropped a significant fraction in seconds.
