A tape drive actually led to my adoption of Linux. Around 1999, I decided that a QIC tape was the best backup solution for my home network. At the time, I had

A tape drive actually led to my adoption of Linux. Around 1999, I decided that a QIC tape was the best backup solution for my home network. At the time, I had a 486 running Windows, and two Apollo 425t running OpenBSD. The 486 may have also dual-booted into OpenBSD. Anyway, I had a bare-bones 386 sitting around and I had upgraded the 486 so much that the spare parts were available to reconstitute the 386. I found a nice floppy tape drive, consumer grade, and wouldn't you know that OpenBSD didn't have floppy tape drivers. So I installed Linux on the 386 and it was a dedicated backup server. At the same time I had a SyQuest EZ 135 that I was very fond of, and those 135MB cartridges could hold good stuff, like a complete complement of Windows updates. But its capacity was too low to be a backup solution, of course; it was storage on-the-go.