[ryanjshaw]

This article is incredibly biased against Windows.

> when the software attempted to divide by zero, a buffer overrun occurred

While it's possible some poor exception handling lead to a buffer overrun, it sounds dubious. Your explanation sounds more likely - do you have any references?

The various random quotes regarding Windows NT's fit for purpose are highly opinionated. The article doesn't mention that at the time Windows NT was certified at the NCSC's C2 rating level; while I'm just guessing, it seems entirely reasonable to select Windows NT because it was the only C2 certified OS with a GUI, which may have simplified development and systems integration given that some of the applications required user input.

[cesarb]

The grandparent comment mentions it was client/server, which probably means a network. AFAIK, Windows NT was certified as C2 only without a network, see for instance http://csc.columbusstate.edu/summers/NOTES/CS459/NT-C2.htm ("Windows NT's C2 certification was conducted on a stand-alone computer. Hence the computer needs to be disconnected from the network by uninstalling all network hardware and software on the system.")

[tzs]

I don't have any specific reference that covers all of it. There were a lot of different stories reported, so it was more of a synthesis of all of them, with some filtering taking into account what I could guess based on titles of people quoted and how they phrased things if they were technical people or management. There are also a lot of details differing in the various articles. For instance, someone said the ship was towed to port and took a couple days to fix. Later reports said it was simply stopped for a couple hours while they fixed it at sea. Then there was a dispute between the story that reported the towing claim and the person they quoted for that, with the later saying he was misquoted and never claimed it was towed, and the magazine insisting they accurately quoted him.

Here's a typical early article: http://gcn.com/Articles/1998/07/13/Software-glitches-leave-N...

It's possible that I've misdiagnosed that the exception was not caught. It is also consistent overall with the reports that it was caught, and so rather than being terminated by the OS the process ignored the divide by 0 and so ended up using some invalid result, leading to the application failing.

[tptacek]

NCSC C2 is absolutely meaningless. You can be sure that NT was positively riddled with significant coding errors. I agree with 'tzs, of course.