Rubbernecking Software Accidents

Everyone who drives past an accident on the road can't help but look at the damage. We all slow down and crane our necks, despite the cumulative effect on the traffic we were just waiting in.

"Rubbernecking," as it's called, is human nature. I don't think it has to do with wanting to see injury, death, or destruction, but rather a drive to learn from others' mistakes.

I always mutter to myself, "What happened here?" as I drive by.

In the same way that I rubberneck on the road, I love reading post-mortem documents for when things go terribly awry with software.

I recently found a copy of the post-mortem document for Microsoft Word 1.0, written on December 17, 1989. Software development today does not look like it did back then. Today, there are fancy IDEs, computing power folks back then could not even imagine, and a little thing called the internet.

But despite the differences over the nearly 35 years since it was published, some things are eerily similar.

The project started in 1984 with a…