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.