Abstract:
Ground level upsets have been observed in computer systems containing large amounts of random access memory (RAM). Atmospheric neutrons are most likely the major cause of the upsets based on measured data using the Weapons Neutron Research (WNR) neutron beam.
My hazy memory of when this paper came out is that there was public speculation that cosmic rays caused bit flips in RAM and this paper was some of the earliest public evidence, motivating development of commercially-available ECC RAM. (But as usual with these things, there’s probably someone who proved the problem 20 years before and some 60s mainframe with solid gold ECC RAM.)