Scary Software

In honor of Halloween, I was trying to think of the scariest software I’ve ever met.

A long time ago, I worked on an embedded project building one of those blood pressure kiosks like you'll find in a drugstore. The brain of the machine was a little 8 bit CPU. Every so often, I’d volunteer my own arm in the machine and measure my blood pressure as a test.

You know when you are getting your blood pressure measured in the doctor’s office …
… and the rubber bladder is starting to feel extra snug around your arm ...
… and you are wondering if the person who is pumping air into the bladder will stop soon?

Now imagine – instead of a person pumping air, there is a machine filling the bladder …
… using software written in C …
… where it only takes one NULL pointer to really make for a spectacular crash.

Scary thoughts were often in my head when my arm was in the machine. I hated it, although nothing bad ever happened.

Eventually, the FBI came, and I retired from embedded work.