It is said that in America, in one of the computer laboratories in a prominent place is a small showcase, which is attached a piece of paper with the inscription very close to the meaning of the call met in the domestic buses: "In an accident, the glass is broken with a hammer". And in the window, there are... scores. Ordinary office accounts are a distant ancestor of today's computers.
Funny? Absolutely.
However, as they say, in each joke there is a share ... jokes, and a call once again to double-check the results of computer calculations, even with the help of accounts, will not seem so absurd if you know what consequences can result from an error in the operation of the computer.
The computer is infallible. This idea, thanks to the first popularizers of computer technology and today's advertising, is firmly entrenched in the minds of people who are confident that the "machine is not going to fail". Alas, this is not true. Computers are wrong. And they do it quite often. At least, much more often than developers would like. "The most reliable computer is the one that is turned off," the programmers' joke about it. And their correctness is confirmed by a series of errors and failures accompanying the work of almost any computer system.
When the very first computer failure occurred, it is not known for certain (most likely on the very first day after the start of the computer), but we can say for sure that the term "bug", denoting a system failure, was introduced in 1943. This happened in America when the Mark-II computer used by the U.S. Navy for ballistic calculations did not know how moths flew in. The trivial event, however, led to disastrous consequences. Poor insect at the cost of his own life has disabled the computer system, short-circuiting the contacts of one of the countless relays within the computational "monster", and thus ... went down in history.
GThe term "debugging" has since taken root and has been used to refer to computer troubleshooting, especially in software". race Murray Hopper, who worked for Mark-II at the time, later recalled this case: "When an officer came to see us to find out what we were doing, we replied that we were cleaning the computer from insects (debugging).
And the term "bug" began to refer to a system failure.
At first, the main reason for the failures of computer systems was the unreliability of the hardware. It couldn't have been any other way. In that congregation of tens of thousands of separate electronic and mechanical elements, which were the first computers, during the working day, there was almost certainly at least one weak element that led to malfunctions in the work, and so the failure-free operation of the machine for a long time was perceived as a miracle.
Over time, however, the hardware became more reliable, but the programs... The programs are still written by people and therefore inevitably contain errors. Alas, people tend to make mistakes...
However, as long as the computers did not go beyond the computer labs, the bugs were an annoying nuisance and a headache for the staff, which was nevertheless relatively inexpensive. However, the era of general computerization that followed and the overconfidence in the infallibility of computers led to an increasing number of people feeling the consequences of mistakes, and the "bugs" themselves became much more expensive.
This collection of facts is by no means intended to intimidate anyone, let alone abandon computers that have become familiar. This is just an attempt to think about whether computers and especially the software they use, are so reliable.
To be continued in the next part https://zen.yandex.ru/profile/editor/id/5d7f7f203639e600ac6686e5/5d8cdbc48d5b5f00aff0b498/edit