I vaguely recall a (probably apocryphal) story of an early washing machine-sized hard drive that lurched its way across the floor during a customer demo, eventually falling over once the connecting cables pulled taught.
Some bands of old-time hackers figured out how to induce disk-accessing patterns that would do this to particular drive models and held disk-drive races.
I vaguely recall a (probably apocryphal) story of an early washing machine-sized hard drive that lurched its way across the floor during a customer demo, eventually falling over once the connecting cables pulled taught.
That said, those hard drives did indeed move themselves: http://catb.org/jargon/html/W/walking-drives.html
I love the Jargon File