Realize that this was also for Tandem - makers of the "Non-Stop" systems with 5 9's reliability (these machines incorporated such things that you could upgrade

Realize that this was also for Tandem - makers of the "Non-Stop" systems with 5 9's reliability (these machines incorporated such things that you could upgrade the ram while it ran, pull things out and it would keep going - even a cpu, etc - it used redundancy and a variety of other special stuff in the OS and was pretty lengendary). Which might explain some of the strange things this kind of testing system can do (ie - crash the CPU). I don't think for most regular systems that this is what the world of testing looked like in the 90s (definitely not from my perspective at the time - I was neck-deep in a VB5 project then). This does seem like an interesting method of testing, though, for those Tandem systems. I'm not sure if those systems are still available today, but I wouldn't doubt that there are examples still running (likely banking/financial sector - where IIRC is where they were mostly used).