3. Unsuitable software ruins USS Yorktown, the most powerful warship:

Operating systems are often designed keeping the user needs in mind. So an OS suitable for an accountant will not work well for a designer. But office management usually ignores such needs. Nobody knew this could turn a mean and powerful warship into a lost little boat.

The disaster:

In 1996, the US Navy ship USS Yorktown which was considered a heavy piece of war machinery was turned into a boat lost in the vast sea. The Navy spent $1 billion on the warship but acted stingy while fixing up the computers on it. They installed dual 200 MHz processor (roughly one-fifth as powerful as a current iPhone) and the systems were to run on Windows NT. as a result their systems completely failed and the warship had to be towed to the coast line.

The silly glitch: dividing by 0

Sounds silly, right? But the advanced piece of machinery had not such advanced software. On September 21, 1997 the system tried to divide by zero which caused a buffer overflow error. As a final result all the systems crashed leaving the warship crippled in the middle of the ocean.

All the navy did was dividing by zero!