softalk-pc-1982-12-reduced

lA person considering the purchase of a memory board for theIBM Personal Comput~r faces a confusing array of choices. Thismonth we'll look at some (but not all) of the available memoryboards, comparing what they offer and evaluating their specialfeatures.The boards we'll cover this time are from IBM, Persyst, AST Research,Seattle Computer Products, and Chrislin Industries.As you probably know, the Personal Computer uses paritychecking; this is a feature that allows the computer's circuitry to testthe validity of its memory operations and to report any failure torepresent data accurately. All the memory products reviewed in thisarticle include parity checking; a few of them allow you to disablethe parity function, presumably so that you can continue using thememory board in the event a single memory chip fails. (What youwould do in that case is replace the bad chip with one of the chipsthat's normally used to hold the parity bit, then disable parity andcontinue running.)FILE-FAX~ DATABASE MAN~CEMENTSYSTEM~ ... '