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 fault was in the chip.
The Magnanimous Doctor Warthan opens the file on the Intel Pentium FDIV bug: the missing entries in a lookup table, the answer that was wrong but perfectly legal, the email that was a polite request for help — and the company that responded to the world’s concern by publishing a statistical study proving the world had no right to be concerned.
The flaw in the machine was tiny. The flaw in the response was not.
The Doctor’s voice and the Society’s imagery are synthesized.