On Fri, Apr 20, 2018 at 12:12 PM, Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
That's a bit different. It's possible that some early Unix machines had actual drum devices for storage or swap (did any of them?), but the /dev/drum device is what Clem says it was.

It's funny, I just happened across this a couple of days ago when I went looking for the `hier.7` man page from 4.4BSD-Lite2:



The claim is that it came from 3.0BSD.
​yes - I believe that is true,​  I just looked at a 4.1 manual it 's definitely there,


 
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Why was it called drum?
​wnj was being 'cute' -- drum's were historically ​the device large systems paged too.  So people understood the reference at the time.

 
I imagine that's historical license coupled with grad student imagination, but I'm curious if it has origin in actual hardware used at UC Berkeley. Clem, that was roughly your era, was it not?
​Yes - very much my era,

Clem​
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