The IDEs we had 30 years ago ... and we lost

Re:The IDEs we had 30 years ago ... and we lost by acuozzo on Saturday October 18, 2025 @03:01PM (#45629620)

> 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.

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Re:The IDEs we had 30 years ago ... and we lost by eviks on Sunday October 19, 2025 @02:05AM (#45632311)

> 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

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Re:The IDEs we had 30 years ago ... and we lost by acuozzo on Sunday October 19, 2025 @02:15PM (#45636502)

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.

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