The way things used to be

A long, long time ago (i.e., the mid-90's), the workings of Moore's law had not yet had their inevitable effect on data mass storage technologies. Corporations were forced to face the fact that they had lots and lots of data (a gigabyte was a lot, back then, believe it or not) on rotating media (disk drives, to the unwashed), and no good way to back it up, since (again, believe it or not) disk was decidedly not cheap, as it is now. In fact, lots of disaster recovery plans were based on laboriously copying data from random-access media (disk drives, again) to sequential access media (that would be ... tape). Trouble was, the cheapest formats of tape didn't hold all that much data, so in order to achieve the volumes you needed, you had to have lots and lots of silly little tape cartridges lying around. And of course, you didn't want them literally lying around -- you wanted them stored in some structured way, so that when disaster struck, you could find the backed up data and get it copied back from tape to a disk ASAP.

The schemes that what was then called the plug-compatible industry (meaning makers of mainframe and large-Unix system peripherals that would mimic IBM hardware) came up with (IBM itself came up with a few, too) were often bizarre. Rooms full of so-called tape robots, for example, basically booths with tapes stored around the sides, their position supposedly known to the software running the device, and with a robotic arm in the middle that would yank out the appropriate cartridge, plug it into the one or two actual tape drives in the installation, and later on, return it to the right storage slot again. Some of these things (when they weren't catching fire -- that's another story) had pass-through windows so that the robots could, in theory, hand tapes to each other. That any of this ever worked is almost beyond belief -- even though many of us were deeply involved in it -- leading to a mantra for those times: "I / we hate tape!"

Anyway, because of a variety of pressures, economic and otherwise, many of these plug-compatible companies were flaky places to work. They tended to get execs who had been fired by IBM or were for some other reason not ready for prime time, and their approach to running an organization was often as far-fetched as the design of their products. And with that, we reach the point of this whole piece, namely another of our old holiday communications, from 1996 or thereabouts, intended to be a faithful reproduction of the employee outreach efforts of such employers. There are a number of inside jokes which won't make a lot of sense, unless you were living the dream, back then, in the far off days when moving parts in mass storage devices weren't considered a bad thing.