Random access memory I believe is defined as memory where the access time is independent of the address. All other storage media (disks, SSDs, tapes, etc.) have an access time which is usually strongly dependent on the address and is somewhat sequential.
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Maybe you didn’t read my whole post? Directly, yes. Randomly, no. There’s nothing truly random in the universe, least of all anything a computer does.
Quantum physicists would disagree…
You missed the biggest reason to prefer “direct” vs “random”. Random access implies that the location of a piece of data and the location of the piece of data retrieved before the current request doesn’t affect the amount of time to retrieve that data. With caches and virtual memory, that’s no longer true, even for RAM.
But alas, languages evolve as they evolve, so it will be forever (or a long time) Random Access Memory.
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This physicist was about to reply the exact same thing. 
We’ve moved on quite a bit since 1905. Einstein perhaps didn’t like it, but indeed, Gott würfelt!
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