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 newbies. See also "{The Story of Mel, aReal Programmer} " in {Appendix A}.