I'll bet the source was talking about large
contemporary storage units that
looked like drums or may have been called "drums" but were not actual 50's
drum memory with tubes and such. There was no rotating drum storage, the
media rotates in the PDP era.
Take a look at any pdp 11 peripheral handbook, there would be drum memory
there if it was an official product.
Key words being "official product".
Digital CSS department - Computer Special Systems, where all that
weird stuff that was DEC engineered and built came from. Call it "low
run semi custom".
--
Will