It must have been great to be the software team when this report hit. It's the only part of the engineering Feynman thinks is really good:
"To summarize then, the computer software checking system and attitude is of the highest quality."
And this is a good example of Conway's Law too, that software grows to resemble its organization. You can imagine that the software team at NASA during this time was the very bleeding edge of software - it was a somewhat new field, and they were doing the most dangerous stuff. I bet they recruited bright people, and those people's only assumption was that failure was not an option. They were probably used to their software failing all the time - they planend for the worst, and expected the worst, and had no preconceptions about their own abilities.
Compare that to the hardware side of things, probably filled with old-school aviation engineers who had been around the world a few times. The managers making the 1 in 100 calculations were probably hardware guys in the past too, because there weren't too many 45 year old programmers when this report came out.
And so they go in, with experience that says airplanes don't crash very much, and a space shuttle is just a big airplane. Cue the bureaucrats with their deadlines and budgets, and mix that with the arrogance of once-technical aviation engineer managers, and a 3% failure rate still sounds pretty rosy.
"To summarize then, the computer software checking system and attitude is of the highest quality."
And this is a good example of Conway's Law too, that software grows to resemble its organization. You can imagine that the software team at NASA during this time was the very bleeding edge of software - it was a somewhat new field, and they were doing the most dangerous stuff. I bet they recruited bright people, and those people's only assumption was that failure was not an option. They were probably used to their software failing all the time - they planend for the worst, and expected the worst, and had no preconceptions about their own abilities.
Compare that to the hardware side of things, probably filled with old-school aviation engineers who had been around the world a few times. The managers making the 1 in 100 calculations were probably hardware guys in the past too, because there weren't too many 45 year old programmers when this report came out.
And so they go in, with experience that says airplanes don't crash very much, and a space shuttle is just a big airplane. Cue the bureaucrats with their deadlines and budgets, and mix that with the arrogance of once-technical aviation engineer managers, and a 3% failure rate still sounds pretty rosy.