Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!torsqnt!lethe!yunexus!davecb
From: davecb@yunexus.YorkU.CA (David Collier-Brown)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Workstation Data Integrity
Message-ID: <13874@yunexus.YorkU.CA>
Date: 15 Aug 90 12:26:17 GMT
References: <1990Aug3.204358.330@portia.Stanford.EDU> <40694@mips.mips.COM> <2399@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> <1990Aug10.171744.9639@zoo.toronto.edu> <2421@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> <1990Aug14.180346.23691@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: York U. Computing Services
Lines: 30

henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
>>| But, but, but... virtually all MSDOS software *explicitly ignores*
>>| parity errors.  

>In article <2421@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen) writes:
>>  Please cite any software (at least from the top 20 best seller list)
>>which does this...

  How about Lotus 1-2-3?  The **newest** version may or may not do so, if
it is not required to run on 8088-series processors, but older versions
certainly did.
  One of its competitors, that I worked on, had to block the parity error
logic in order to run reliably.  It would have been unacceptable to merely
crash every time we had a parity error since our compeditors didn't!
  We also usually got them hourly on our XT's, (if memory serves) Thud and
Nermal. Maybe on some other machines, too...  I don't remember the ATs
having the problem.

  Strangely enough, this blocking seemed to have no effect on the program: a
recalculation after a parity error yeilded the same answers as before.
Subsequently it was suggested that the PC and XT chip addressing logic was
having adressing errors, which were reported erroniously as parity errors.
So maybe we never has parity errors at all (:-)).

--dave
-- 
David Collier-Brown,  | davecb@Nexus.YorkU.CA, ...!yunexus!davecb or
72 Abitibi Ave.,      | {toronto area...}lethe!dave 
Willowdale, Ontario,  | "And the next 8 man-months came up like
CANADA. 416-223-8968  |   thunder across the bay" --david kipling