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>the rate at which bitflips are caused by gamma rays is absolutely dwarfed by the rate at which bitflips are caused by manufacturing defects.

back in USSR/Russia gamma rays and aliens were not-an-issue compare to the extremely low reliability of USSR/Russia hardware. The military hardware back then (and some telco hardware built in Russia in 199x (some even for export into Western countries!)) was built as triplicate systems - i.e. primitive quorum/consensus computing.

Similarly, as far as i heard back then, due to low reliability of Itanium especially in the beginning, the Itanium based Tandems were also available as "Tridems".




Except for the case in the USSR when gamma rays were an issue at a train depot computer system due to radioactive cows from near Chernobyl: http://www.jakepoz.com/debugging-behind-the-iron-curtain/




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