Comment by dboreham

Interesting. I had not heard that story before, although I believe one or two of my old friends were working at Sun on Sparc development at the time. The curious thing about this story is that when I worked in the memory business for a while in the late '80s I was told that the major source of alpha particles that could cause soft errors was the device packaging material. As it was explained to me, earlier in DRAM history they were usually packaged in ceramic packages (also military applications always used ceramic). Later no plastic packaging materials were used because they were less expensive (and presumably the associated reliability issues had been resolved sufficiently to allow the use of plastic in more applications). Anyway, the plastic didn't emit alpha radiation like the ceramic did. When it was explained to me I got the impression everyone in the business knew this.