The Chronicles of Gas-Plasma

I remember gas plasma displays being used in the machine room of an IBM 3090

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3090

circa 1987

They had a system where the computer would tell people to get a 9 track tape

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-track_tape

out of the rack and mounted that used plasma displays. Funny I had a 286 machine that had a 32 MB hard drive but I wrote my own software to archive files on 1.2 MB floppies that would tell me to fetch disk 45 or whatever and a friend of mine had written similar software for a TRS-80 color computer (which I had had previously) and he had even written his own filesystem for it.