ASR33 parity (was: Re: "stop bits")

If you are sitting there reading text interactively, a garbled character is no big deal, and you can ignore it/interpolate what the correct one should be, and not care. But, there can exist situations where KNOWING that a character is wrong is more important, perhaps enough so that you would rather repeat the entire transmission until you get a copy with no errors. Likewise, "all parity memory does is make the whole PC freeze up [when a memory error occurs] while you are trying to get important work done" (while printing the payroll?) Would you rather continue, unaware that an error has occured? Or have to redo the task? Admittedly, I think that the "recovery" options of the parity handling of the 5150 were grossly inadequate. Consider Brett Salter's "Periscope", or even the freeware NMIEXIT.COM But, IBM felt strongly that they would rather face complaints about computer stopping and not getting results, than complaints about it producing WRONG results. OTOH, many people would rather IGNORE all errors. Central Point's PCTools, in order to avoid the "absolutely intolerable" situation of disruption of their pretty screen displays by disk error messages, intercepted the critical error vector, and changed ALL errors to an automatic response of "IGNORE"! I found THAT out when I realized that the disk retries that seemed to resolve, and never produced an error message were actually loss of sector(s) of my "INCOMING ORDERS TELEPHONE LOG" file! I immediately switched that text editing back to PC-Write. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com