drum adj, n. Ancient techspeak term referring to slow,
cylindrical magnetic media that were once state-of-the-art storage
devices. Under 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, a
Real Programmer}" in Appendix A.