Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen
From: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Workstation Data Integrity
Keywords: Partiy checking
Message-ID: <2436@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Date: 21 Aug 90 17:28:59 GMT
References: <1990Aug3.204358.330@portia.Stanford.EDU> <40694@mips.mips.COM> <2399@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> <1990Aug10.171744.9639@zoo.toronto.edu> <14623@drilex.UUCP> <1990Aug20.151438.27121@ecn.purdue.edu>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen)
Organization: GE Corp R&D Center, Schenectady NY
Lines: 19

In article <1990Aug20.151438.27121@ecn.purdue.edu> hankd@dynamo.ecn.purdue.edu (Hank Dietz) writes:

| BTW, none of old machines I've played with has ever had a parity error
| (i.e., bad RAM chip), although I've seen a fair number in newer
| machines.  Remember the days when companies used to actually test
| machines *BEFORE* shipping them...?  ;-)

  You are either really lucky or had top quality machines not available
to us mortals. We used to run memory test as the idle daemon in S100
systems, and right after boot and fully warm with our Intellec systems.
I wrote my own memory test for the Z80, to force the M1 fetch into every
byte, so I could try the worst case timing.

  I haven't had a parity error in a memory chip with more than four
hours burn-in on any of my systems in quite a while, but I still have a
ziplock full of 1702's from the "old days." Note I don't call them good.
-- 
bill davidsen	(davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
    VMS is a text-only adventure game. If you win you can use unix.