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@david_chisnall @cstross
Back in the 1980s, Tandem Computers brand was "nonstop computing"; everything was duplicated so they had failover.

In their demonstrations they would sometimes take an axe to one of the cpu cases, and the system would switch over and keep running.

The rumor I heard was that eventually they had bad luck with a power surge and stopped the axe trick, but their redundancy was a fine idea by itself.

In the same era I read an unclassified research paper about a cpu system for US Air Force jets that had *three* microprocessors purely for redundancy, not just two -- which technically makes sense, but the expense is a hard sell outside of critical markets like military.

@bjoreman @siracusa