From: "Joel C. Ewing" <jcew...@acm.org> Date: 02/07/2013 05:27 PM
<snippage> The Wood history of HASP/JES2 left hanging the question about the origin of the term "spooling". Various authorities credit SPOOL as being an acronym for either Simultaneous Peripheral Output On-Line or Simultaneous Peripheral Operations On-Line, used to describe a process which pre-dated S/360 by at least half a decade where card images and/or print lines were staged through much faster I/O devices (magnetic tape in the old days) to keep slow printers and card equipment from being a bottleneck on expensive mainframes of the day. This acronym always seemed a tad too cute. Since early "spooling" systems staged unit records to a spool of magnetic tape, it would have been natural to refer to this process as "spooling", which makes me suspect that was the inspiration for someone to invent SPOOL as a backronym to fit, and allow continued use of the term after spools of tape were no longer the staging media. <snip> Perhaps one should ask someone with long Burroughs experience? I mention this because of past acquaintances who worked for Burroughs and explained a few things they had done before any other computer manufacturer. SPOOL reminds me of the command they had called "SPO" which as I recall was used to control SPOOL (I do not have any direct operations experience with Burroughs equipment). Regards, Steve Thompson ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
