On 4 June 1996, the maiden flight of the Ariane 5 launcher didn’t go well. 40 seconds after take-off, the massive rocket suddenly veered from its flight path and exploded. The cause was a tiny software error: a floating-point number represented using 64 bits was converteddata into the area of memory being used to control the rocket’s engines. The backup computer did no better, with the result that the rocket lost control and came to a fiery end.
