The home computers like those from Commodore, Apple, Atari etc. lacked protection against memory errors, but the computers intended for business, like the IBM PC and all its clones had memory error detection capability in the form of parity.

Absolutely all IBM PC originals or clones until those with 486 and with the early Pentium variants supported parity on the motherboard.

The user could choose to not install the parity chip (or when the first memory modules appeared there were also slightly cheaper modules without the parity chip), but that was the user's decision, all the motherboards supported parity.

On IBM PC compatibles, the lack of protection against memory errors had never existed before Intel segmented the market between "non-Pro" and "Pro", by launching the Triton chipset, which no longer supported parity memory.

As long as the memory modules were byte-wide, only parity could be implemented. ECC memory could appear only later, after the passage to wide memory modules.