Frontispiece
A field guide to the bugs of computing.
Naturalists used to walk into the world with a notebook, a pencil, and the conviction that everything they encountered deserved to be drawn. The drawings are what survive: the specimen, the silhouette, the careful caption beneath. This is that, for software bugs.
Specimens collected from the published record between 1947 and 2024. Each is illustrated, dated, taxonomized, and described in the voice of someone who finds the particular causes interesting and the consequences instructive. No screenshots, no stack traces. Diagrams only. The catalog grows when a specimen earns its page.
Begin anywhere. The order is curatorial, not chronological.
- BG-001 · 2002 Network Anomalies
The 500-Mile Email
Sendmail epistola quingentorum milium
Email cannot travel more than 500 miles from the campus.
No data lost. A statistics chair questions his sanity.
- BG-002 · 2024 Radio-Frequency Specimens
The Wi-Fi That Worked Only When It Rained
Aqua restituens signum
The wireless link returned 98% packet loss except during storms.
One season of online classes, taken in the rain.
- BG-003 · 2008 Calendar-Coupled Faults
OpenOffice Will Not Print on Tuesdays
Magicus dies Martis
PostScript jobs misidentified as Erlang bytecode on Tuesdays only.
Weekly status reports go unprinted.
- BG-004 · 1962 Aerospace Calamities
Mariner 1's Missing Overbar
Vinculum absens
A single missing overbar in transcribed source destroyed the rocket.
$18.5M ($190M adj.), 293 seconds of flight, one Venus probe.
- BG-005 · 1985-1987 Concurrent-Programming Fatalities
Therac-25
Acceleratio fatalis
A race condition between operator keystrokes and turntable rotation.
At least three deaths, multiple severe injuries, removed from service.
- BG-006 · 1991 Floating-Point Tragedies
The Patriot at Dhahran
Tempus erroneum
A clock that drifted 0.34 seconds across one hundred hours of uptime.
28 American soldiers killed, around 100 wounded.
- BG-007 · 1980 Integer-Overflow Game Artifacts
Pac-Man Level 256
Ludus arcadiae fatalis
The 256th level is half a maze and half garbled memory.
The first widely-observed "kill screen."
- BG-008 · 1991 (alleged), 2010 (canonized) Apocryphal Specimens
Nuclear Gandhi
Fabula apocrypha
A bug that never happened, now built into the game on purpose.
One of the most cited bugs in computing, almost certainly a myth.
- BG-009 · 2012 Deployment Catastrophes
Knight Capital's 45 Minutes
Vexillum reanimatum
A deprecated flag reused, on one server out of eight, on deploy day.
$440M loss in 45 minutes; the firm did not survive the quarter.
- BG-010 · 1994 Silicon Defects
The Pentium FDIV Bug
Tabula divisionis lacunosa
Five missing lookup-table entries; one wrong division in nine billion.
$475M write-off; the modern era of public bug response begins.
- BG-011 · 1947 Etymological Curiosities
The Hopper Moth
Lepidopterum primum
The most famous specimen in computing, taped to a logbook page.
The first literal bug. The word was already in use.
- BG-012 · 2003 Infrastructure-Scale Faults
The Northeast Blackout
Conditio cursoria reticularis
A silent alarm subsystem hung; operators watched stale screens for an hour.
50 million people without power across eight states and Ontario.