As this term progresses, we'll be looking at a number of stories (anecdotes, case studies, war stories) of extant computing systems, their designs, their failures, and what we can learn from them. Here are the ones we've covered to date (and the authors of the summaries).

• Browser Security
  • Presented 5 December 97
  • Presented by Raphen Becker, Justin Kinney, and Kevin Notheis

• Metaphors in Program Design
  • Presented 26 November 1997
  • Presented by Cathy White and Yu Yin
  • Original at http://www.math.grin.edu/~white/presentation.html

• The Year 2000 Problem
  • Presented 21 November 1997
  • Presented by Geoff Bright and Brendan O'Fallon
  • Original at http://www.math.grin.edu/~ofallonb/Outline.html

• Computer Viruses
  • Presented 14 November 1997
  • Presented by Andrew Cody, Aaron Dale, and Kevin McLaughlin
  • Original at http://www.math.grin.edu/~mclauhl/presn.html

• Computers, Privacy, and Secure Systems
  • Presented 7 November 1997
  • Presented by Courtney Sherwood and Jamal Rogers
  • Original at http://www.math.grin.edu/~sherwood/Presentation.html

• The Many Body Problem: Perspective on Performance
  • Presented 31 October 1997
  • Summary by Sunil Sitaula and Amartey Pearson

• The Airbus A320
  • Presented 17 October 1997
  • Summary by Lea Wittie and Ryan Gerling
  • Source: ???

• Rounding Errors in Floating Point Calculations
  • Presented 10 October 1997
  • Summary (not yet available) by Chris deBeer and Wyatt Gaswick
  • Source: ???

• The Therac 25 Incident
  • Presented 6 October 1997
  • Summary (not yet available) by Dan Wislocki
  • Additional online reading available at http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~cs3604/lib/Therac_25/Therac_1.html

• Java Security
  • Presented 29 September 1997
  • Summary by Tony Stubblebine and Omar Ghaffar
  • Source: Sun's white paper

• Russian space disasters
  • Presented 12 September 1997
  • Summary by Evan Schnell and Robert Reasoner
  • Sources: see summary

• The Ariane 5 Crash
  • Presented 5 September 1997
  • Summary by Samuel A. Rebelsky
  • Source: Report by the Ariane 5 Flight 501 Inquiry Board

Forthcoming