We Programmers are Important too...

For Want of a Nail, A Kingdom was Lost! goes a famous rhyme. Quite often, major events depend on such small and seemingly inconsequential things that they are often overlooked, leading to terrible disasters. When Apple first released its popular iTunes program, thousands of Mac users installed the program, only to find their hard drives wiped out. The reason, apparently was a missing semi-colon (;) in the code caused by an (apparently) sleepy programmer. Thankfully, only drives where the folder names began with a period were affected. Not so lucky was the Mars Polar Lander which crashed on the surface of Mars in 2000.The error was just a single line of code, probably so obvious that (ironically) no one noticed it. More recently, it appears as if software bugs are causing Patriot missles to aim and fire at coalition planes instead of enemy targets.

(Wonder how my Project Manager felt when she ended up with 2500 emails in her mailbox after I forgot to edit out a line of code while testing the email server!)
Related Aside: Winning entry in a competition to devise the worst Windows error message: "WERE you sure?"