What is meant by the term spooling? Give an example of when it can be used.

Spooling refers to the use of a temporary storage area, a buffer held in memory for a peripheral device to access when it's ready to process the instruction. This is because devices access data at different speeds. Job references are stored in the spool queue, according to priorities. This technique allows slower devices to interact with faster ones; an example is when data is stored to a disk drive when printing. The CPU is much faster than the printer so references are stored in a queue.

ZN

Related Computing A Level answers

All answers ▸

Discuss the differences between operating systems designed for desktop computers and embedded systems.


Project Euler Question 3: What is the largest prime factor of the number 600851475143?


Why would you use Assembly Language instead of a normal programming language?


Some problems are intractable. What does it mean for a problem to be described as intractable?