Journaling vs. power failure

Journaling vs. power failure

Wandering a bit offtopic here, but it relates to the comments about hard drives and power failures, and to a feature I've not seen a Unix (or Linux) box in a long time.

Back in the mid 80s I was doing evaluations of various Unix boxes, and remember one -- I think it was from NCR, but I wouldn't swear to it -- that would not only save itself when the power was interrupted, it would resume previously running processes when powered back up. It had enough backup power (or nonvolatile RAM?) to snapshot its state when it detected a power drop.

I tested it with a program that produced sequential output, and yanked the power plug. Plugged it back in about ten minutes later and the box did a fast boot, recovered the processes, and the program continued the output sequence where it left off.

Clearly this is trickier in a networked environment, since some of the state of a running networked process will be elsewhere on the net. But it was damn impressive, and a feature I've wanted in desktop machines more than once. (Although a UPS certainly helps.) Anyone familiar with this machine and how they implemented it?