Hi Steve,
I knew that "SPO" sounded familiar from my B3500 days in a former life.
Someone once told me it was "Supervisory Printer Online", which I suppose
was adapted to a terminal? Long time ago - 1976 for me.
Here's an interesting link (actually - I googled Burroughs B3500 and was
amazed at number of hits!).
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/burroughs/B1700/1058294_B1700_SPO_Ctl_jun72.pdf
BobL
-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf
Of Steve Thompson
Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2013 4:50 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: JES2 Hist from Jack Schudel(ret.) [ External ]
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
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