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 ▸What is the difference between HTML, CSS and JavaScript
What is the decimal equivalent of the following sequence of bits, which represents an unsigned binary integer: 1101001. What is the decimal equivalent if the sequence in bits encodes a two’s complement binary integer.
What the main differences between an interpreter and a compiler?
A computer stores floating point numbers of size 1 byte, with 3 bits for the mantissa and 5 bits for the exponent. State what the effects would be on the stored numbers if instead 5 bits were used for the mantissa and 3 bits were used for the exponent.