Related: In Specialty Engineering, we had to irradiate the hell out of the CPUs and see what happened. This was done by running cables into the rad chambers and

Related: In Specialty Engineering, we had to irradiate the hell out of the CPUs and see what happened. This was done by running cables into the rad chambers and then running a program on the CPU to test all of the chips and other stuff on the motherboards as they were blasted. Most of the time, we just went up in dosage until the system failed, which wasn't long. One thing that always stuck out to me though, were the counters in the room. We'd leave one in the test chamber as close to the parts as possible, to get more accurate readings. Those little counters always borked out. The 7-part digital counters would just flicker and dance about in the rads. These 'hardened' counters would always fail first, and a lot sooner, than the CPUs. I was just doing the dosing, not the code in the CPU. But if those very simple counters were fried well before the more complicated CPUs, and they were not in the full thrust of the radiation, then I can't imagine what those guys were doing to mitigate their code in that rad-soup. It was very impressive.