washing machine

n. 1. Old-style 14-inch hard disks in floor-standing cabinets. So called because of the size of the cabinet and the top-loading access to the media packs and, of course, they were always set on spin cycle. The washing-machine idiom transcends language barriers; it is even used in Russian hacker jargon. See also walking drives. The thick channel cables connecting these were called bit hoses (see hose , sense 3). (The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 76-02-20:2. The previous cartoon was 75-10-04. ) 2. [CMU] A machine used exclusively for washing software. CMU has clusters of these.