This is excellent. I’m glad these days we can generally do all of this in software and most problems are much more apparent.

Click Here to Read the Full Story (patrickthomson):

Back in the early 80’s, my dad worked at Storage Technology, a now-defunct corporate entity that made tape drives and pneumatic systems to drive these tapes at high speeds – for that period of time.

(Used under license from Laughing Squid. The original is available here.)

They had hacked engineered the tape drives such that you could have one central drive – the ‘A’ drive – connected to seven other ‘B’ drives, and a small operating system on some RAM attached to the A drive would delegate the reading and writing of data across all of the B drives.