Right: This is the operator's terminal of an IBM System/370 mainframe computer dating from 1981. You can see a bank of five tape drives whirring away in the background and, behind them, cupboards filled with stored tapes. If the computer needed to read some really old data (say, last year's payroll records or a backup of data made a few days ago), a human operator had to search for the correct tape in the cupboard and then "mount it" (load it into the drive) before the machine could read it! We still talk about "mounting" discs and drives to this day, even when all we mean is getting a computer to recognize some part of its memory that isn't currently active. Photo courtesy of NASA Glenn Research Center (NASA-GRC).