Another interesting part of the story is the user element. The issue was most often triggered by fast, experienced technicians who were able to key commands more quickly than Therac engineers anticipated:
> After strenuous work, the physicist and operator were able to reproduce the error 54 message. They determined that speed in editing the data entry was a key factor in producing error 54.
Some years later, I interviewed at Knight Capital, just a couple of weeks before their blowup. (Dreadful interview at which I did dreadfully, being asked to write C _over the phone_ by a supremely uninterested engineer. Quite a red flag in retrospect.)
> Therac-25 is a great case study for software engineers too, recommend reading the Wikipedia article for anyone who hasn't, it's not too long.
I re-read the original paper every few months, more frequently if I'm working on Safety-of-Life-Critical equipment. Which, given my day job, means I'm re-reading it every couple of weeks at most.
The audience of this website is disproportionately aware of the Therac-25 compared to the general public. For the obvious reason, engineering, but also geographically: The Therac-25 being a North American incident that affected Canada and the US. Whereas Theryc is a French company.
While I do agree with your point, as a Swede not even born when the incidents happen I still knew about it, was brought up in a computer science class.
If I have cancer then whether to trust the radiation machine due to the name is certainly a choice I can make, but you get to own your own priorities in that case.
Exactly what I thought as soon as I learned the name.
It's like, man, how to kill a product?
No pun intended.
It could even work? But you put yourself behind such a poorly placed 8 ball when you do these things. Even among researchers, people are a little superstitious about stuff like this. It's always in the back of everyone's mind.
I doubt any of that is valid. Therac-25 happened 44 years ago, that's a very long time, and many people involved in cancer research today weren't even alive when it happened.
"Theryq" and "Therac" are not quite the same either. The word "therapy" and derivatives of it using "thera" are still used widely across the medical industry.
So I'm not really sure why anyone here is making a big deal about the name of the company being "Theryq".
> Even among researchers, people are a little superstitious about stuff like this.
Being superstitious is not common in the medical treatment world, where weird product names are common.
A doctor isn’t going to include the device’s brand name in their decision process for treating a cancer patient.
The Therac-25 case study is noted in the medical world but not to the same extent as in engineering. The case was a tragedy of bad engineering, but the doctors involved in directing the treatments were not at fault for the radiation over exposures.
> Previous models had hardware interlocks to prevent such faults, but the Therac-25 had removed them, depending instead on software checks for safety.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
Another interesting part of the story is the user element. The issue was most often triggered by fast, experienced technicians who were able to key commands more quickly than Therac engineers anticipated:
> After strenuous work, the physicist and operator were able to reproduce the error 54 message. They determined that speed in editing the data entry was a key factor in producing error 54.