[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.