Computing Calamities: Lessons Learned From Products, Projects, and Companies that Failed - Softcover

Glass, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0130828629 ISBN 13: 9780130828620

Publisher: Prentice Hall, 1998

Synopsis

In his follow-up to the best-selling Software Runaways, Robert Glass brings together 30 of the worst computer-industry failures of all time -- and shows how you can prevent disaster from happening to you. Computer Calamities is organized into six short sections, each featuring a collection of articles relating to a particular type of computer-industry disaster. All the biggest failures of the past decade are here: Cray's failed supercomputers; Citicorp's $600 million blunder; the collapse of Wang; the failure of the Commodore Amiga; Jim Manzi's Nets, Inc., Unisys' mismanaged Usoft, and dozens more. If you enjoyed (and learned from) Software Runaways, you'll love Computing Calamities.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Glass is an author and consultant on software quality issues who has written more than 10 books on the topic. He owns his own company, Computing Trends, and writes a column on software Engineering for ACM Communications Magazine. He is also author of Software Runaways: Lessons Learned from Massive Software Project Failures.

From the Back Cover

8286B-4

Super bloopers from the world of high technology!

The current buzz about the Millennium Bug is just the latest in a long line of "gotchas" that have plagued the computer industry since its beginning. Many great advances in technology have resulted from risky experimentation, but it's critical to remember and study the spectacular failures that also resulted from some of those risks.

Failures can be mundane, like the typical complaints of software projects that are behind schedule and over budget, while others can be much more extravagant. In Computing Calamities, Robert L. Glass has collected war stories from around the industry, including:

• The brilliant engineers whose software allowed viewers to play along with TV game shows, if only they could find a cable system that would support the bandwidth
• Supercomputing budgets that collapsed along with the Soviet Union, as Cold War funding dried up
• A French company that stole an American company's product design, then sued the American company for copying them
• The management team that put a former clothing manufacturer in charge of the inventors of Pong, nearly bankrupting a company that had held 80% of its market
• The "improved" HMO database that could reject 1,000 claims if one Social Security number was entered in the wrong field

Laugh at these mistakes, and learn from them. Someone else's failure could be the foundation of your success.

Edition details

• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0130828629
• ISBN 13: 9780130828620
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352