This paper describes a new architecture for device drivers for tape drives attached to UNIX-like systems. The design goals are presented, some current architectures are measured against the requirements, and a new architecture is described along with its advantages and disadvantages. This architecture was developed, and this paper was written, while the author was at Silicon Graphics. The work continues at SGI for IRIX, SGI's variant of UNIX, and for Linux. The resulting Linux software will be licensed as Open Source