Thinker Toys (was: KFC (was: Mark your calendars for VCF 4.0

From: allisonp_at_world.std.com <(allisonp_at_world.std.com)>
Date: Thu Jun 22 14:09:14 2000

> So, knowing nothing about the half-life of the welding material,
> can you tell me, has the material in the welds decayed enough now
> that the board should operate in a more stable fashion?
>
> -dq
>

It was the timing problem... the failure rate (soft) for the alpha
particle thing was so low you'd see power hits and other gremlins
first.

S100 system were prone to bus noise (even with wonderbus) so where a
card was installed could litterally mean fail/flakey/works for the same
card! Bus termination schemes were used to help but the 22 slot bus was
too long and a more modest 18 or 12 slot was always more reliable.

Dram cards were by and large trouble as they were most sensitive to timing
problems. I always ran static for testing and some systems for that
reason.

Allison
Received on Thu Jun 22 2000 - 14:09:14 BST