A lot of you who have studied Computer Science have been confronted with sorting problems. They are good computer class assignments, implementing bubble sort and other sorting algorithms.
The problem we discussed about sorting when I studied Computer Sciense in1986 was of a of another kind. The problem was how to most efficently sort many records using tape drives.
It felt a bit obsolete even then, but the problem was real in some situations for data centers at that time. Some data was to large to sort in memory, or even on disk, for servers then. We had some assignments where we calculated how to most efficently sort large data sets using multiple tapes and tape drives. The key to it all was to have two or more tape drives and three or more tapes and increasingly refine the sorted data by attaching them in the correct sequence.
I kind of prefer todays SELECT name FROM users SORT BY name ASC 
Nowadays disk and RAM is ridiculously cheap. But 20+ years ago both were expensive and the capacity was only a fraction of todays capacity. So using tape drives was important then.
