drum

n. Ancient techspeak term referring to slow, cylindrical magnetic media that
were once state-of-the-art storage devices. Under some versions of 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' in
Appendix A.

