drum

   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.

[glossary]