This implies that old hardware always worked, which I strongly doubt (what year did hardware go from always working to not?).
Of course, trying to work around it in software is utterly futile.
I thought they (from cosmic rays, etc.) were always a thing, but so rare that you needed a very large system (in scope or time or both) to have a substantial chance of encountering one (outside of noisy comm channels, which use error correction protocols for exactly that reason.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72#Conclusion
Cosmic rays were suspected but unconfirmed (kind of hard to confirm after the fact).
"All the aircaft in the world" for sixty years is kind of a large system given that currently there are on the order of one million people in the air at any moment.
Bits flipping due to hardware that didn’t work well was what caused Xerox PARC to implement an error correcting memory for MAXC, fifty years ago.
> Bit flips due to buggy software was a thing though.
No kidding.