Ep. 44: I Fell In to a Burning Ring of Fire

A machine that was supposed to heal became one of the deadliest medical devices of the twentieth century, and nobody could figure out why. This week, we dig into the Therac-25, a radiation therapy machine whose software errors delivered massive, lethal overdoses to patients across the US and Canada in the mid-1980s. We walk through the race condition bugs that let operators override safety checks in a matter of keystrokes, the manufacturer that dismissed early reports as impossible, and the investigation that turned this into one of the founding case studies in software safety engineering. It's a story about how a few lines of bad code became a body count.