drum
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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 newbies. See also “ The Story of Mel'” in Appendix A.

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