If you look closely, the boundary between devices that are block addressable and those that are not is not well defined. Everyone agrees that a di is a block addressable device because no matter where the arm currently is, it is always po sible to seek to another cylinder and then wait for the required block to rotate under the head. Now consider a tape drive used for making disk backups. Tapes contain a sequence of blocks. If the tape drive is given a command to read block. N, it can always rewind the tape and go forward until it comes to block N. This operation is analogous to a disk doing a seek, except that it takes much longer Also, it may or may not be possible to rewrite one block in the middle of a tape Even if it were possible to use tapes as random access block devices, that i stretching the point somewhat: they are not normally used that way The other type of I/O device is the character device. A character device de livers or accepts a stream of characters, without regard to any block structure. It i not addressable and does not have any seek operation. Printers, network inter- faces, mice(for pointing), rats(for psychology lab experiments), and most other devices that are not disklike can be seen as character devices This classification scheme is not perfect. Some devices just do not fit in for example, are not block addressable. Nor do they generate or accept character streams. All they do is cause interrupts at well-defined intervals