Same thought from a slightly different perspective. Decades ago I built a networking stack from scratch. It's wasn't wonderfully reliable. Years later I figu

Same thought from a slightly different perspective. Decades ago I built a networking stack from scratch. It's wasn't wonderfully reliable. Years later I figured out why. I was wet behind the ears back then, and I put my faith in ARCnet's 16 bit CRC. Had I put aside that blind faith for just a few seconds and looked at how many packets per second that we being sent versus the number that would get through then - well I didn't. I'm going to claim it wasn't entirely my fault. ARCnet did automatic resends for you so if fixed what the CRC detected, and silently what it didn't detect through. I had no idea the errors were happening. ECC is nice, but as you say I don't need fancy hardware to correct a malfunctioning RAM chip. I can do that perfectly well with a hammer. What I need is the hardware to tell when and where to deploy the hammer. Things were actually better 30 years ago - back then PC RAM had parity. It's cheap, fast and effective enough. I have no idea what went wrong.