[tofof]

This particular bug is often taught in university compsci classes as "bug that killed people" is a good attention grabber -- the CS/EE analysis is sound; its truthfulness is only suspect because of the DoD's claimed successes.

A more truthful "computer bugs that killed people" example would be the Therac-25 - a machine intended to treat cancer with tightly-focused radiation therapy. Six patients died as a result of massive overdoses of radiation, on the order of 20,000 rads. It was possible for the machine to end up in a state where it delivered full-power radiation without a hardware shield in place to protect the rest of the patient's body. No hardware interlocks were used to ensure that the full power mode was only usable with the shield in place - all safety features relied on software. In addition, the bug was only possible when an operator made a mistake in mode selection and then rapidly (proficiently) corrected it - the rapidity required prevented the bug from being discovered during slow, methodic, careful testing.

See Hackaday's article Killed by a Machine (and associated HN discussion) or for the especially curious, a 49-page post-mortem for more detail:

https://hackaday.com/2015/10/26/killed-by-a-machine-the-ther...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12201147

http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf