Reliability Engineering

Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2020 07:39:31 +1100 (EST)
From: Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org>
Newsgroups: local.coff
Subject: Re: [COFF] non-volatile main memory (NVMM)
Organization: A poorly-installed InterNetNews site
Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.21.9999.2002210735410.1121@aneurin.horsfall.org>

On Thu, 20 Feb 2020, George Ross wrote:
> We used to regularly restart machines which had been turned off for a
> while, and they would happily pick up where they left off.  One PDP-8 was
> happy to resume after several years of idleness.

There was a story posted to Usenet yonks ago about a minicomputer (PDP-8?)
being used for nuclear testing.  The last test involved the box inside a
truck, parked on top of the hole.  Truck flies up into the air, but the core
memory survived intact, was retrieved, and plugged into another box and all
the data read out.  Try doing *that* with solid-state memory :-)