Omega7Red

Topic

Technology

53 formulae on file

The Code That Would Not Die

On 1 August 2012, two hundred and twelve ordinary customer orders arrived at Knight Capital. Forty-five minutes later the firm had made four million trades and lost roughly ten million dollars a minute.

The Pentium Chip That Could Not Divide

In the autumn of 1994, a mathematics professor in Lynchburg, Virginia spent four months convinced he had made a mistake. He had checked his equations. He had rewritten his program. He had even found a genuine bug in his compiler — and it turned out to be innocent.

The 2003 Blackout: The Alarm That Never Rang

On August 14, 2003, fifty million people from Detroit to New York City lost power in the largest blackout in North American history. There was no bomb. No attack. No mastermind. Just a hot afternoon, a few untrimmed trees, and a control-room alarm that quietly stopped ringing — and never told anyone it had.

The Max Headroom Hijack Is Still Unsolved

On the night of November 22nd, 1987, a man in a grinning mask seized two Chicago television stations — hijacking a sportscast and then a British sci-fi rerun with ninety seconds of distorted nonsense. Nearly forty years later, no one knows who he was.

The Machine Said Five Missiles Were Coming. One Man Said No.

Just past midnight on September 26th, 1983 — three weeks after the Soviets shot down a passenger airliner, with the Cold War at its coldest — a computer screen in a secret bunker lit up with one word: LAUNCH. Then another. Five American missiles, it said. Confidence: certainty. The duty officer had minutes, no second opinion, and one doubt.