30 Jun
2007
30 Jun
'07
4:08 p.m.
On Jun 30, 2007, at 2:08 AM, Bob Rosenbloom wrote:
I was the designer of the Boulder Creek Systems board.
It would
have been nice to be able
to disable the PC's base memory to allow all ECC memory but there
was no easy way without
hacking up the main board. At a West Cost Computer Show in 1982,
some IBM employees
came up to my booth and pulled out memory chips while the board was
running on an extender
card. They did not believe it was real ECC memory. After seeing it
was still running, IBM bought
50 boards. That was our biggest sale. No one else really cared
about the ECC, they just wanted
more memory for cheaper.
...Could that have been the beginning of the divergence of the PC
world from the rest of the computing world? ;)
The board had single bit correction, and multi-bit
detection which
would
then generate the parity error. ECC codes were generated in a small
bipolar PROM.
Most impressive!
Somewhere
I still have my main board that I hacked to disable the RAM and run
all ECC cards.
Very cool! That needs to be documented on a web page somewhere!
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL