Editing Spooling (section)

== Other applications ==
Spooling is also used to mediate access to [[punched card]] readers and punches, [[magnetic tape]] drives, and other slow, sequential I/O devices. It allows the application to run at the speed of the CPU while operating peripheral devices at their full rated speed.

A [[batch processing]] system uses spooling to maintain a queue of ready-to-run tasks, which can be started as soon as the system has the resources to process them.

Some [[store and forward]] messaging systems, such as [[uucp]], used "spool" to refer to their inbound and outbound message queues, and this terminology is still found in the documentation for [[email]] and [[Usenet]] software.