» a.out: The Best Debugging Story I've Ever Heard
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
hackedengineered 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.
