A closer look
Before hard drives got cheap, IBM's solution for mass storage was a terrifying electromechanical beast that literally whipped magnetic tape around. The 1964 IBM 2321 Data Cell Drive housed huge bins of magnetic strips. When you requested data, a mechanical arm would aggressively plunge into the bin, yank out the exact strip, wrap it around a drum to read it, and slap it back. It was notoriously loud, wildly complex, and frequently jammed, earning the nickname "the noodle picker." It was basically a giant robotic librarian with serious anger management issues.
