It's interesting to compare this with the Post Office Scandal in the UK. Very different incidents, but reading this, there is arguably a root assumption in both cases that people made, which is that "the software can't be wrong". For developers, this is a hilariously silly thing, but for non-developers looking at it from the outside, they don't have the capability or training to understand that software can be this fragile. And they look at a situation like the post office scandal and think "Either this piece of software we paid millions for and was developed by a bunch of highly trained engineers is wrong, or these people are just ripping us off". Same thing with Therac-25, this software had worked on previous models and the rest of the company just had this unspoken assumption that it simply wasn't possible that there was anything wrong with it, so testing it specifically wasn't needed.
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