"Finally, this phenomenon hinges on the exact timing of the RAS signal at the nanosecond level, and on many machines the critical situation simply doesn't occur. The timing (and thus the probability of a crash) depends on factors such as temperature, VIC revision, parasitic capacitance and resistance of the traces on the motherboard, power supply ripple and interference with other parts of the machine such as the phase of the colour carrier with respect to the dotclock. The latter is assigned randomly at power-on, by the way, which could be the reason why a power-cycle sometimes helps."
Slightly off topic but it's pretty cool to live in a day and age where people can post logic analyzer dumps of hardware processes and debug them together on the internet.
It is unfortunate 4164s dates before CAS before RAS refresh. Not all 41256s supports it either I think. There were even SIMMs with labels indicating that they are for Mac Plus/SE only when Apple had to use Siemens chips that don't support it.
Fully agreed. But HN's convention is to append the year to articles from previous years. That isn't a bias for newness, but a bias for oldness—that is, for things that stand the test of time.
Historical material is more than welcome on Hacker News. One key function of this site is to distribute historical knowledge into what otherwise tends to be an amnesiac industry/community/society. More historical material, everybody, please!
Adding the year isn't a criticism, it's simply a marker that this particular article posted on Hacker News isn't new, so you don't get confused reading an article about something that happened years ago.
