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From: ddb@ns.network.com (David Dyer-Bennet)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Workstation Data Integrity
Message-ID: <1990Sep24.212559.6035@ns.network.com>
Date: 24 Sep 90 21:25:59 GMT
References: <40694@mips.mips.COM> <2399@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> <1990Aug10.171744.9639@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: Terrabit Software
Lines: 25

In article <1990Aug10.171744.9639@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
:But, but, but... virtually all MSDOS software *explicitly ignores*
:parity errors.

The original article is dated 10-Aug, but no later ones in the thread
have reached this site.

This is a new story to me; what I KNOW is that I have had bad memory
chips in my ibm pc detected and reported by the parity logic.  It gave
me enough information to identify the chip, and replacing that chip
cured the problem.

The lack of any way to test the parity system is extremely
unfortunate. 

(Parity handling wouldn't come to the attention of the individual
program unless it went to special effort, it would be handled in
MS-DOS itself.)


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