I’m not sure how I’d feel about being in a machine that broke down that often that was responsible for shooting a beam of ionizing radiation into my body.
Ran on a DEC PDP/11 though, so … neat!
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If you were subject to this treatment and now some 40 years later you are still around to write about it, then hopefully you were one of the lucky ones where the treatment helped rather than made it worse.
I am currently undergoing radiotherapy and only hope the technology has moved on and improved greatly in this time. I am hoping its not controlled by the hospitals outdated windows 7 system. Praying for linux but not asked them.
Thanks for posting the report, medical info is sometimes difficult to obtain and usually written for those who are in the know.
This is a relatively known about case of a malfunctioning device. It’s popular in the IT ethics crowd because a lot of people had to get injured/killed before they would actually do anything about it…
I wonder what software current linear accelerators run. I don’t think it would affect treatment much however, because since THERAC-25 they’ve gone back to depending on hardware safety mechanisms instead of software, which was the reason that whole disaster happened.
I just find the idea of being on the business end of a malfunctioning machine really disturbing, especially a machine that does what those machines do.
I’m sure less known cases aren’t publicized as much.
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