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From: kleef@cs.vu.nl (Patrick van Kleef)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Memory reliability
Message-ID: <1068@ark.cs.vu.nl>
Date: Tue, 4-Aug-87 06:27:52 EDT
Article-I.D.: ark.1068
Posted: Tue Aug  4 06:27:52 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 6-Aug-87 00:48:51 EDT
References: <8708010521.AA25524@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> <4401@sunybcs.UUCP>
Reply-To: kleef@cs.vu.nl (Patrick van Kleef)
Distribution: world
Organization: VU Informatica, Amsterdam
Lines: 27

In article <4401@sunybcs.UUCP> leo@gort.UUCP (Leo Wilson) writes:
>In article <8708010521.AA25524@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> FXDDR@ALASKA.BITNET writes:
>>Recent talk about a 16 MB ram disk and how long it would last between random
>>bit hits made me wonder about the memory reliability issue.
>>several years) in each word.  I recall a business pundit in the early days of
>>the IBM PC who claimed that the PC was the only machine that could be used
>>in business because it had parity-checked RAM.  After all, you wouldn't want
>>a bit to change in your ledger where it could cause a 2**n dollar error.
>
>If my own memory serves me correctly, IBM PC's don't actually use the parity
>bit, it's just there.

Guess you never suffered any 'parity errors' on an IBM-PC like I have..

Great thing, that parity check. Simply hangs up the machine once a
seamingly flaky ramchip has been located. Sure, it prevents 
multi-billion dollar errors in your spreadsheet from occurring... it
just stops the program (the whole machine, in fact) and therefore kills any
data you've entered.

Lots of ppl in the PC world therefore use a program called parity.com or
nocheck.com in their autoexec.bat file to eliminate that check.

Paul
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