[ExI] scratch monkey
Mike Dougherty
msd001 at gmail.com
Sun Jul 21 14:58:03 UTC 2013
On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 10:39 AM, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
I assumed this use of scratch and mount. Now that you've clarified, I
imagine what other mental picture one might have from "mount a scratch
monkey" - haha.
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