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What kind of storage are you thinking of?

I'm very attached to the idea of using magnetic tapes instead of disks. Why? Historical reasons: (1) Tapes was around for decades before disks were invented and they last long before disks got to settle as dominant technology for storage, and (2) because tapes present interesting limitations that I definitely want to deal with.

You can not insert records in the middle of a tape nor you can replace existing records in place. Instead, you need to read data from a source tape, perform the required processing in memory, then copy the result to a second tape. As your memory is limited, you can not simply copy the whole file into memory so you need to process your data in sequence, one block at a time.

Since tapes are sequential in nature, data structures such as queues and stacks are natural to them and sequential algorithms such as Merge Sort are essential, which is interesting to try out.

Specially challenge is to implement a Time-Sharing system based solely on tapes. I don't think is even possible, but it is definitely interesting to think about those kind of complex applications within the tremendous limitations that tapes portrait.