Men born between 1893 and 1897 reminded to register for the draft

And more importantly, the humans who programmed it probably don't work for the selective service. Obviously all "computer errors" are technically the fault of a human somewhere down the line, but in common usage it means that "I didn't make a mistake, the computer didn't do what I told it to do".

A computer seeing an instruction, be deciding on its own free will to not follow it, an do something else.

That would be a pure hardware error. For example a cosmic ray hitting a cell the DRAM and flipping a bit. Or maybe the Intel FP-Bug, could also be a computer error.

Anything else in software is a programming error, but not necessarily a programmer error, since it might start with wrong HW specs, compiler bugs, etc.

It sure does:

".. the agency uses a two-digit code for the birth year, which is why the years 1893 to 1897 were mixed up with the years from 1993 to 1997."

Their recruiting zombies i tell you! :P

Sorry couldn't help myself.

Ok, that makes more sense.

That must be distressing for the families.

As an aside: Do the SS send letters to dead people born between 1993-1997? You'd assume they'd check for death records or have some way of being notified about that.

For example if a boy is born in 1993 but died at age 5, do the parents get a letter from the SS in 2011 telling the boy to register for the SS?

Or it's a legacy system they never bothered properly fixing and just used some quick hack when 2000 rolled around.

> but figured that there weren't that many people over the age of 118 floating around

The letter shown in the example was sent to someone who died in 1992 so there's at least some evidence to suggest that floating around is not a necessary condition to receive the letter.