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
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