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From: tim@amdcad.AMD.COM (Tim Olson)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: UNIX NAME ABBREVIATIONS
Message-ID: <19267@amdcad.AMD.COM>
Date: Mon, 23-Nov-87 14:18:12 EST
Article-I.D.: amdcad.19267
Posted: Mon Nov 23 14:18:12 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 26-Nov-87 06:51:06 EST
References: <10376@brl-adm.ARPA> <16550@topaz.rutgers.edu> <388@cogen.UUCP> <1886@celtics.UUCP> <1051@swlabs.UUCP>
Reply-To: tim@amdcad.UUCP (Tim Olson)
Organization: Advanced Micro Devices
Lines: 23

In article <1051@swlabs.UUCP> jack@swlabs.UUCP (Jack Bonn) writes:
| In article <6706@brl-smoke.ARPA> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>) writes:
| >In article <388@cogen.UUCP> alen@cogen.UUCP (Alen Shapiro) writes:
| >>		  "spool" (Simultaneous Peripheral Operation Off Line)
| >I suspect this is revisionist acronym retrofitting.
| 
| I agree.  I thought spool referred to the spool of magtape that you hung 
| to collect the line printer data for later.  Remember magtapes?

Alen is close -- it's "Simultaneous Peripheral Output On Line".  Page 10
of Andrew Tanenbaum's MINIX book agrees with this acronym.

Spooling was originally done to disk, so it couldn't refer to Magtape.


Here's another little-know acronym -- BSS (as in uninitialized data
sections).  It was from an IBM assembly-language mnemonic by the same
name, which stood for "Block Started by Symbol".


	-- Tim Olson
	Advanced Micro Devices
	(tim@amdcad.amd.com)