jargon.artrocity.com
New Hacker's Dictionary the Jargon File v 4.4.6
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.