The book has a picture of the IBM 2321 Data Cell Drive, 1964 to 1975.[1] That's an exotic peripheral for the original IBM System/360, a tape strip library. Before disks got big, there were various mechanical kludges to select storage media from a library and move them to a read/write unit. IBM had several such mechanical systems. This one was a commercial product with modest success.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_2321_Data_Cell