Three stories about code escaping its authors. Joe Engressia, born blind and gifted with perfect pitch, whistled his way into the long-distance network at seven and later taught the phone phreaks who taught Wozniak. The Therac-25 replaced its safety interlocks with software and overdosed six patients before a hospital physicist, Fritz Hager, reproduced the fault on his thirty-seventh try. And Y2K, where retired COBOL programmers spent five years and several hundred billion dollars to make nothing happen.
This chapter has not been serialised yet. It will appear on Substack first, and this page will carry its opening when it does.
- In this chapter
- Joe Engressia, John Draper, Fritz Hager, Ray Cox, Nancy Leveson, Peter de Jager, John Koskinen
- The idea it builds
- In-band signalling and the 2,600 hertz tone; a race condition; and why two-digit years made 2000 look like 1900.