Battling borked bits

Not long after the first personal computers started entering people's homes, Intel fell victim to a nasty kind of memory error. The company, which had commercialized the very first dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chip in 1971 with a 1,024-bit device, was continuing to increase data densities. A few years later, Intel's then cutting-edge 16-kilobit DRAM chips were sometimes storing bits differently from the way they were written. Indeed, they were making these mistakes at an alarmingly high rate. The cause was ultimately traced to the ceramic packaging for these DRAM devices. Trace amounts of radioactive material that had gotten into the chip packaging were emitting alpha particles and corrupting the data.