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Comment by Vivtek | Hacker News Reader

Well, there was that case maybe ten years ago of the nuclear carrier that had to be towed back to port after a BSoD killed it dead in the water; its control systems all ran Windows.

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> On 21 September 1997, while on maneuvers off the coast of Cape Charles, Virginia, a crew member entered a zero into a database field causing a divide by zero error in the ship's Remote Data Base Manager which brought down all the machines on the network, causing the ship's propulsion system to fail.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Yorktown_(CG-48)#Smart_ship...

Wow. Reading more of the wiki article (and linked sources) reveals that the actual towing to port is a contested issue. Noone denies that a /0 error killed the whole ship though.

Ok I don't feel so bad now. I was stationed on a nuclear carrier and one day I accidentally deleted the entire supply/logistics/personnel/maintenance database cluster.

I mean come on, the menu option was labeled "Re-index databases". I thought it would make it go faster :)

I ended up just making something up and restoring from backup.

So the problem was actually the data validation logic in the application, allowing invalid data to get into the database (and why no constraint on the database field?) coupled with no exception handling on a division operation (always a red flag). None of that has anything to do with Windows, really, but it's an easy cheap shot to take.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Yorktown_(CG-48)#Smart_ship...

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