The Spooler

Last updated

The Spooler was a systems software package from DataCorp of Virginia that provided spooling facilities for the IBM System/370 running DOS/VS, DOS/VSE environment, and IBM System/360 running DOS/360 or retrofitted with modified DOS/360, such as TCSC's EDOS. Other venders offering The Spooler as part of their OS were Amdahl, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Magnuson, and RCA.

The product

The Spooler was an operating system enhancement available for DOS, DOS/VS, DOS/VSE, announced in 1976, [1] and came packaged with some third party DOS-based operating systems.

It 'spooled' (queued) printer and card data, freeing programs from being dependent upon the speed of printers or punched card equipment. [2]

The Spooler competed with IBM's POWER and SDI's GRASP. Like GRASP, The Spooler could reside in an independent 'Fn' partition. DataCorp advertised that it offered significantly more features than ASTEC, GRASP/VS and POWER/VS while using less virtual memory, a smaller working set, and fewer CPU cycles. [3]

Platforms

Software

The product ran under several DOS-related platforms:

Hardware

Hardware platforms included:

Several other venders either offered The Spooler as part of their OS or certified compatibility:

Marketing

The Spooler was sold by DataCorp of Virginia, in Harrisonburg, Virginia. The marketing manager and chief salesman was Chaz Frank. Although their target audience was North America, initial sales were in the American South.

For overseas sales, DataCorp engaged in both mail order and local vendors. The product was also embedded in third party operating system packages.

Development

The Spooler was originally developed at Carolina Steel in Greensboro, North Carolina by Don Stoneman, with the assistance of Harry Parrish and Charlie Rice. The program went into production in 1975.

Upon commercialization in 1976, development moved to DataCorp of Virginia, in Harrisonburg, Virginia, under the direction of Leigh Lundin.

Source of controversy

DataCorp's original intention had been to continue development at a major banking data center they owned in Harrisonburg. However, their application programmers reported they did not have the expertise in-house.

DataCorp, already in talks with independent developer, Leigh Lundin, for his Fx package, contracted with him to take over The Spooler. Three weeks later, after receiving the supposed source code, Lundin reported it had been encrypted and stripped of references and internal notes.

DataCorp attempted negotiations with the original developer and pursued legal avenues, without fruition. Computer Associates stepped into the struggle, but failed to exploit it. The result was that DataCorp legally owned the rights to the package and had a growing customer base, but they also had bug reports and no viable source code.

Their independent developer had vested time decoding and decrypting the original package to build a legal case. When DataCorp realized they were in an untenable position, Lundin proposed building decryption tools to reconstruct the packages. Within months, he had re-engineered the package and begun development of new versions.

DataCorp, fighting off a second takeover attempt by CA, felt less comfortable than ever and, by the early 1980s, discontinued development.

Fx

The Spooler required a dedicated partition. With DOS having only three partitions and DOS/VS seven, giving up a partition to The Spooler placed a crimp in practicability.

Leigh Lundin designed Fx, a pseudo-partition that relieved the user from relinquishing a working partition. Fx appeared in the DOS/VS version of SDI's Grasp as F0.

Related Research Articles

MVS Operating system for IBM mainframes

Multiple Virtual Storage, more commonly called MVS, was the most commonly used operating system on the System/370 and System/390 IBM mainframe computers. IBM developed MVS, along with OS/VS1 and SVS, as a successor to OS/360. It is unrelated to IBM's other mainframe operating system lines, e.g., VSE, VM, TPF.

VSE (operating system)

z/VSE is an operating system for IBM mainframe computers, the latest one in the DOS/360 lineage, which originated in 1965. Announced Feb. 1, 2005 by IBM as successor to VSE/ESA 2.7, then-new z/VSE was named to reflect the new "System z" branding for IBM's mainframe product line.

Spooling

In computing, spooling is a specialized form of multi-programming for the purpose of copying data between different devices. In contemporary systems, it is usually used for mediating between a computer application and a slow peripheral, such as a printer. 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. Conversely, for slow input peripherals, such as a card reader, a spooler can maintain a sequence of computational jobs waiting for data, starting each job when all of the relevant input is available; see batch processing. The spool itself refers to the sequence of jobs, or the storage area where they are held. In many cases, the spooler is able to drive devices at their full rated speed with minimal impact on other processing.

Amdahl Corporation

Amdahl Corporation was an information technology company which specialized in IBM mainframe-compatible computer products, some of which were regarded as supercomputers competing with those from Cray Research. Founded in 1970 by Gene Amdahl, a former IBM computer engineer best known as chief architect of System/360, it has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Fujitsu since 1997. The company is located in Sunnyvale, California.

Disk Operating System/360, also DOS/360, or simply DOS, is the discontinued first member of a sequence of operating systems for IBM System/360, System/370 and later mainframes. It was announced by IBM on the last day of 1964, and it was first delivered in June 1966. In its time, DOS/360 was the most widely used operating system in the world.

PL/S, short for Programming Language/Systems, is a "machine-oriented" programming language based on PL/I. It was developed by IBM in the late 1960s, under the name Basic Systems Language (BSL), as a replacement for assembly language on internal software projects; it included support for inline assembly and explicit control over register usage.

A logical partition (LPAR) is a subset of a computer's hardware resources, virtualized as a separate computer. In effect, a physical machine can be partitioned into multiple logical partitions, each hosting a separate instance of an operating system.

Plug compatible refers to "hardware that is designed to perform exactly like another vendor's product." The term PCM was originally applied to manufacturers who made replacements for IBM peripherals. Later this term was used to refer to IBM-compatible computers.

The history of operating systems running on IBM mainframes is a notable chapter of history of mainframe operating systems, because of IBM's long-standing position as the world's largest hardware supplier of mainframe computers.

OS/360 and successors Operating system for IBM S/360 and later mainframes

OS/360, officially known as IBM System/360 Operating System, is a discontinued batch processing operating system developed by IBM for their then-new System/360 mainframe computer, announced in 1964; it was influenced by the earlier IBSYS/IBJOB and Input/Output Control System (IOCS) packages for the IBM 7090/7094 and even more so by the PR155 Operating System for the IBM 1410/7010 processors. It was one of the earliest operating systems to require the computer hardware to include at least one direct access storage device.

DUCS was a teleprocessing monitor from CFS Inc. It was one of two early local teleprocessing packages for IBM's DOS/VSE environment. DUCS provided an interface and access method for programmers to 'talk' to monitors. Such access methods later became known as APIs.

Westi was one of two early local teleprocessing packages for IBM's DOS/VSE environment. Westi stood for Westinghouse Terminal Interactive. Westi provided an interface and access method for programmers to 'talk' to monitors and handle data entry. Such access methods later became known as APIs and the handlers a form of transaction processing.

DOCS was a software package for IBM mainframes by CFS Inc., enabling access to the system console using 3270-compatible terminals.

Edos is a discontinued operating system based upon IBM's original mainframe DOS. The name stood for extended disk operating system.

The IBM Kanji System was announced in 1971 to support Japanese language processing on the IBM System/360 computers. It was later enhanced by the support of IBM System/34, IBM 5550 and DOS/V.

Grasp (software)

GRASP was a systems software package that provided spooling facilities for the IBM/370 running DOS/VS or DOS/VSE environment, and IBM/360 running DOS or retrofitted with modified DOS.

POWER was an IBM operating system enhancement package that provided spooling facilities for the IBM System/360 running DOS/360 or retrofitted with modified DOS/360. Upgrades, POWER/VS and POWER/VSE were available for and the IBM System/370 running DOS/VS and DOS/VSE respectively. POWER is an acronym for Priority Output Writers, Execution processors and input Readers.

OS/VS2 (SVS)

Single Virtual Storage (SVS) refers to Release 1 of Operating System/Virtual Storage 2 (OS/VS2); it is the successor system to the MVT option of Operating System/360. OS/VS2 (SVS) was a stopgap measure pending the availability of MVS, although IBM provided support and enhancements to SVS long after shipping MVS.

IBM 303X

The IBM 303X is a discontinued line of mainframe computers, the first model of which, the IBM 3033 Processor, nicknamed "The Big One", was introduced March 25, 1977.

References

  1. ↑ "'Spooler' Supports DOS Operations". Computerworld. April 26, 1976. Retrieved Nov 20, 2021.
  2. ↑ Lundin, Leigh; Stoneman, Don (1977). The Spooler User Guide (2 ed.). Harrisonburg: DataCorp of Virginia.
  3. ↑ DataCorp (February 7, 1977). "Advertisement". Computerworld. Retrieved Nov 20, 2021.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.