Spooling

Spooling allows programs to "hand off" work to be done by the peripheral and then proceed to other tasks, or to not begin until input has been transcribed.

A dedicated program, the spooler, maintains an orderly sequence of jobs for the peripheral and feeds it data at its own rate.

Similarly, before spooling was added to PC operating systems, word processors were unable to do anything else, including interact with the user, while printing.

Depending on the configuration, banner pages might be generated on each client computer, on a centralized print server, or by the printer itself.

On printers using fanfold continuous forms a leading banner page would often be printed twice, so that one copy would always be face-up when the jobs were separated.

Some systems would also print a banner page at the end of each job, assuring users that they had collected all of their printout.

For example, a job which read punched cards or generated printed output directly was forced to run at the speed of the slow mechanical devices.