Guardian: A Fault-Tolerant Operating System (BA ch 8)

The Tandem/16 NonStop hardware was the Sherman tank of computers. Redundancy and fault tolerance were built in from the start. The designers premise that things will fail and taking a proactive approach in this regard was great. Personally, I have never worked on one of these machines myself. I would be interested to hear from others who actually have. Did the machines truly fail with a slow degradation of services or was one or two failures enough to set off a cascading avalanche of failures rendering the machine unusable? How was performance compared to other machines from the same timeframe?

There is no doubt that these things were beasts. It was a remarkable piece of engineering and it would be great to see more of this type of thinking in our PCs of today.