washing machine

1. Old-style 14-inch hard disks in floor-standing cabinets. So called because of the size of the cabinet and the `top-loading' access to the media packs -- and, of course, they were always set on `spin cycle'. The washing-machine idiom transcends language barriers; it is even used in Russian hacker jargon. See also {walking drives}. The thick channel cables connecting these were called bit hoses (see {hose}, sense 3).

   [76-02-14.png]

   (The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 76-02-20:2. The previous cartoon was 75-10-04.)

2. [CMU] A machine used exclusively for {washing software}. CMU has clusters of these.

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