Spooling - Origin of The Term

Origin of The Term

According to Tanenbaum, "Spool" is an acronym for simultaneous peripheral operations on-line. For printers: simultaneous peripheral output on line. Early mainframe computers had no disk drives and slightly more recent ones had, by current standards, small and expensive hard disks.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, computers used SPOOL software to copy files from one medium to another: punch card to tape, tape to punch card and tape to printer, with occasional use for card-to-card copying. The introduction of the relatively inexpensive IBM 1401 led to a temporary reduction in the use of SPOOL software.

Read more about this topic:  Spooling

Famous quotes containing the words origin of the, origin of, origin and/or term:

    The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.
    Georges Bataille (1897–1962)

    The origin of storms is not in clouds,
    our lightning strikes when the earth rises,
    spillways free authentic power:
    dead John Brown’s body walking from a tunnel
    to break the armored and concluded mind.
    Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)

    High treason, when it is resistance to tyranny here below, has its origin in, and is first committed by, the power that makes and forever re-creates man.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    It’s given new meaning to me of the scientific term black hole.
    Don Logan, U.S. businessman, president and chief executive of Time Inc. His response when asked how much his company had spent in the last year to develop Pathfinder, Time Inc.’S site on the World Wide Web. Quoted in New York Times, p. D7 (November 13, 1995)