May 15, 2003

drum

adj, 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.

Posted by Jargon File at May 15, 2003 10:50 AM

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