This would be a consumer protection law like any other such law.

Forcing the vendors to sell only products that do what they are advertised cannot be considered in any way as "forcing unnecessary things upon people".

Any computer without ECC memory is a computer that does not compute from time to time and you have no idea when that happens.

Originally, any IBM PC or compatible had memory error detection.

All this problem of the computers without ECC memory has been created by some evil Intel employees, who have conceived around 1994 a scheme for market segmentation between "Pentium" and "Pentium Pro".

So they removed memory error detection support from the Pentium chipsets (Intel Triton), so that this would remain a marketing feature exclusive to the "Pro" Intel products.

Obviously the removal of this feature from "consumer" products was done without any price reduction, which made happy also the memory vendors, because this trick increased their profits.

So in the next years this market segmentation method became the "standard" business practice, preying on the naivety of most computer users.

A consumer protection law should force that any computer or motherboard must support ECC, which adds a completely negligible cost.

The end users may buy non-ECC modules, if they choose so, but non-ECC modules should be sold like cigarettes, with a visible advertisement that using such modules may cause unpredictable errors in your computer.

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flaunf221 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Any computer without ECC memory is a computer that does not compute from time to time

So are the computers with ECC memory. It's not an absolute protection either.

	▲	graemep 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Seatbelts and working brakes are not an absolute protection either, but i still want them.

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lightedman 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

"All this problem of the computers without ECC memory has been created by some evil Intel employees, who have conceived around 1994 a scheme for market segmentation between "Pentium" and "Pentium Pro"."

I hate to break it to you but the computer I had in the 80s didn't come with ECC. Non-ECC computing was a thing WELL BEFORE Intel tried to think of market segmentation. Revisionist history is not welcomed here.

	▲	etbe 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The original IBM PC/XT had parity RAM. In the early PC/XT and PC/AT clones you had banks of 9 DIP sockets for memory chips with the 9th being for parity. The DDR4 ECC RAM has 72 bits total and 64bits of data which means the same 9/8 ratio of data storage to usable data as the original PC/XT. The Z80 and 6502 based computers in the 80s typically didn't have parity RAM. The Amiga and Macintosh were higher performance systems in the 80s which also didn't have parity RAM. We could and should have gone straight from parity RAM to ECC RAM for everything.
	▲	adrian_b 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The home computers like those from Commodore, Apple, Atari etc. lacked protection against memory errors, but the computers intended for business, like the IBM PC and all its clones had memory error detection capability in the form of parity. Absolutely all IBM PC originals or clones until those with 486 and with the early Pentium variants supported parity on the motherboard. The user could choose to not install the parity chip (or when the first memory modules appeared there were also slightly cheaper modules without the parity chip), but that was the user's decision, all the motherboards supported parity. On IBM PC compatibles, the lack of protection against memory errors had never existed before Intel segmented the market between "non-Pro" and "Pro", by launching the Triton chipset, which no longer supported parity memory. As long as the memory modules were byte-wide, only parity could be implemented. ECC memory could appear only later, after the passage to wide memory modules.