Comment by acuozzo

6 months ago

> You'd see people who really knew the interface fly through tasks being multiple keystrokes ahead of the UI.

I remember.

This, unfortunately, killed people: Therac-25. Granted, the underlying cause was a race condition, but the trigger was the flying fingers of experts typing ahead, unknowingly having been trained to rely on the hardware interlock present in older models.

> This, unfortunately, killed people: Therac-25. Granted, the underlying cause was a race condition

So it didn't kill people, something else was that cause

  • I'm not trying to shift blame to the operators here, but in the absence of flying fingers, nobody would have died. Many, many, people received the right treatment in the Therac-25 machine.

    Also, the author of the buggy software had no idea it would be used to operate a machine without a hardware interlock as, AFAIR, it was not modified prior to being used with the Therac-25 model.