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A long, long time ago, Compaq was demoing some gigantic new server which had redundant, hot swappable everything. As the presenter mentioned that you could simply pull out a DIMM on the fly, my friend reached in and did so, which powered off the machine completely.

Probably the most stressful job in the world is giving high-profile tech demo's...

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Funny anecdote, but does "hot swap" necessarily mean "yank out without warning"? My understanding is that you might need to tell the kernel that you are going to yank out a component before doing so. Similarly after adding in a component you might have to poke the kernel and say "hey, new stuff here" before you can use it.

Well he said it was "redundant everything".

Still, I suspect it was probably designed to handle unexpected 1-bit errors and, like you're saying, allow for replacing RAM modules with the cooperation of the OS.

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