Software Folklore – A collection of weird bug stories
Obvious in retrospect, but very surprising to my inexperienced past self:<p>I'd been working on some C code for an hour or two. It wasn't behaving how I expected it to (and at the time I knew nothing of debuggers), so I added a print statement and recompiled. I got a compilation error: something like "Syntax error on line 123: #incl5de <stdio.h>". Shocked, I scrolled to that line in my text editor to fix the typo, but it wasn't there. I compiled the same code again and there were no errors.<p>Turns out there wasn't a bug in my code! I immediately shut down my computer because my RAM was going bad. To this day, what surprises me most is that my computer was able to successfully boot and behave normally for an hour or two, even though random bits were apparently being flipped.