Related:

• washing machine: n. 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'....
• hose 1. vt. [common] To make non-functional or greatly degraded in performance.
  That big ray-tracing program really hoses the system....
• hose: 1. vt. To make non-functional or greatly degraded in performance.
  That big ray-tracing program really hoses the system....
• maximum Maytag mode n. What a washing machine or, by extension, any disk drive is in when it's being used so heavily that it's shaking like an old Maytag with an unbalanced load.
  If prolonged for any length of time, can lead to disks becoming walking drives....
• maximum Maytag mode: What a {washing machine} or, by extension, any hard disk is in when it's being used so heavily that it's shaking like an old Maytag with an unbalanced load.
  If prolonged for any length of time, can lead to disks becoming {walking drives}....
• usty memory: n. Mass-storage that uses iron-oxide-based magnetic media (esp.
  ape and the pre-Winchester removable disk packs used in {washing machine}s)....
• laundromat n. Syn. disk farm; see washing machine.
• PDP-10 n. [Programmed Data Processor model 10] The machine that made timesharing real.
  It looms large in hacker folklore because of its adoption in the mid-1970s by many university computing facilities and research labs, including the MIT AI Lab, Stanford, and CMU....
• walking drives: n. An occasional failure mode of magnetic-disk drives back in the days when they were huge, clunky {washing machine}s.
  Those old {dinosaur} parts carried terrific angular momentum...