drum

drum adj, n.  Ancient techspeak term referring to slow,
   cylindrical magnetic media that were once state-of-the-art storage
   devices.  Under BSD UNIX the disk partition used for swapping is
   still called `/dev/drum'; this has led to considerable humor
   and not a few straight-faced but utterly bogus `explanations'
   getting foisted on {newbie}s.  See also "{The Story of Mel, a
   Real Programmer}" in Appendix A.



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