Integrating Ethics into a Computing Curriculum: A Case Study of the Therac-25: A paper on teaching ethics of real-time systems

This is a paper on teaching the Therac-25 case with particular reference to understanding the race conditions that underlie some of the errors. We contend that, given the poor understanding of race conditions in the 1970s, it is anachronistic to blame AECL programmers for not handling these with correct synchronization techniques. This does not absolve AECL of blame for many other system safety errors, but it places the case in its historical context.

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