[ExI] scratch monkey

[Keith Henson]

On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 5:00 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

> Subject: Re: [ExI] Revealed: how Microsoft handed the NSA access to
>         encrypted messages
snip

>> >Always mount a scratch monkey.
>>
>> And what exactly is a scratch monkey?
>
> http://edp.org/monkey.htm
>
> Scratch Monkey Story
>
> 11 February 1987

The scratch part of the expression comes from the era of spinning
tapes.  A scratch tape that was used for intermediate data storage,
the contents of which you did not care about,  This was before
computer memory reached a MB, much less a GB so intermediate sort
results and the like were spooled to tape.  Writing to a scratch tape
did no harm.  "Mount" was the physical act of loading a tape and
enabling the computer to read it, and that is an expression still used
for disks to this day in Linux.

Keith