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Subject: Re: Most obscure bug *ever*

Author: Richard Pijl

Date: 13:51:41 10/23/02

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On October 23, 2002 at 15:25:04, Colin Frayn wrote:

>How annoying is that?  :)
>Can anyone beat this story?

An old story, and not my own, but among the best that I heard of. The bug
occurred way back, in 1991.
A product that has been running for years without problems suddenly crashed on
friday 13th, somewhere in September. Although the actual build was running on
OS/2 instead of the trusted DOS, the product was really the same. Of course,
everybody looked at virus possibilities first but the machine was clean. Until
the trouble shooter found out that the day the crash occurred was the 256th day
of the year.
It appeared that the day-of-the-year counter was specified as a character in the
code, instead of an integer so there was an overflow.
The DOS version just had a lucky data alignment so it never surfaced in that
version.

Richard.




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