Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxl!ihnp4!zehntel!hplabs!sri-unix!BILLW@SRI-KL.ARPA From: BILLW@SRI-KL.ARPA Newsgroups: net.micro Subject: Re: Is parity *really* worth it? Message-ID: <702@sri-arpa.UUCP> Date: Fri, 3-Aug-84 18:33:00 EDT Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.702 Posted: Fri Aug 3 18:33:00 1984 Date-Received: Mon, 6-Aug-84 00:48:48 EDT Lines: 16 Although parity increases your confidence that data in memory is valid, it isnt clear to me (from a software point of veiw) that this necessarrilly does the user any good. In a critical application, it could be a very bad thing for a word of memory to suddenly go bad, but it could be worse for the system to crash with a "parity error" message, and lose ALL your data. Most software is not equiped to handle parity errors in any reasonable manner. Parity errors are pretty rare anyway. How many people have actually sen a parity error on their IBMPCs? I get the impression that with the fancy ECC chips on the market these days, it is easier to implement ECC than parity (although more expensive, of course). Is this impression correct? BillW