[ExI] scratch monkey

[Mike Dougherty]

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.