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Computers process bits of information. A bit can take a value of 0 or 1, and computers process these bits through some physical mechanism. In the early days of electronic computers, this was done by electromechanical relays [28] which were soon replaced by vacuum tubes [6]. From the very beginning, these devices and the computers they were used to build were affected by concerns of reliability. For example, in a relatively recent interview with Presper Eckert [1] who co-designed eniac, widely believed to be the first electronic computer built, he notes: "we had a tube fail about every two days, and we could locate the problem within 15 minutes."