What Do You Get When You Cross a Computer with a Warship?

In September 1997, while conducting fleet maneuvers in the Atlantic, the USS Yorktown, one of the Navy's new Aegis guided-missile cruisers, stopped dead in the water. A Navy technician, while calibrating an on-board fuel valve, entered a zero into one of the shipboard management computers, a Pentium Pro running Windows NT. The program attempted to divide another number by that zero a mathematically undefined operation which resulted in a complete crash of the entire shipboard control system. Without the computers, the engine halted and the ship sat wallowing in the swells for two hours and 45 minutes until it could be towed into port. Good thing it wasn't in a war zone.

What do you get when you cross a computer with a warship? Admiral Nimitz is rolling in his grave! Despite this setback, the Navy is committed to computerizing all of its ships because of the manpower cost savings. To deflect criticism of this plan, it blamed the "incident" on human error. Because the software-creation process is out of control, the high-tech industry must bring its process to heel, or else it will continue to put the blame on ordinary users while ever-bigger machines sit dead in the water.