On Sat, Jun 21, 2025 at 1:44 PM Chris Adams <li...@cmadams.net> wrote:

> During the last solar max cycle (like 2002 or so IIRC), a bunch of some
> particular model Cisco routers were crashing and/or rebooting in ISP
> networks because Cisco went cheap (relatively speaking, still expensive
> routers) and didn't use ECC RAM.  And the cycle before that (around
> 1990) it was Sun servers crashing.


As long as we're trading stories, back in the 1980's (yeah, I'm old) I was
working on HP's MPE3000 systems.  The model 64 had special memory that held
the microcode.  The microcode was constantly being checked for errors.  It
was usually pretty good but every once in a while there would be some kind
of error and the system would halt.  One day an HP engineer was in
replacing the microcode memory and I jokingly said the problem was probably
a stray cosmic ray.  He looked at me and said "you're not far from the
truth."  Turns out the memory chips were in ceramic cases and there was
some radioactive decay and a stray alpha (or is it beta?) particle would
hit one of the bits, flip it, and cause the error.


-- 
Charlie
-- 
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