Houston Automatic Spooling Priority

The Houston Automatic Spooling Priority Program, commonly known as HASP, is an extension of the IBM OS/360 operating system and its successors providing extended support for "job management, data management, task management, and remote job entry."

OS/360 included spooling routines, called reader/interpreters and output writers. Each reader/interpreter was "responsible for reading one input job stream" – that is one input device. Likewise each output writer was responsible for controlling one printer or punch. Spooled data were stored in OS temporary datasets controlled by standard OS services. Each reader/interpreter or output writer was a separate operating system task in its own partition or region. A system with a large number of readers, printers, and punches might have a large number of spooling tasks.

HASP was developed by IBM Federal Systems Division contractors at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston. The developers were Tom Simpson and Bob Crabtree. HASP was a program that ran on a mainframe, and performed functions such as: scheduling, control of job flow, spooling and printing/punching. HASP had no support for IBM System/360 Operating System Remote Job Entry, 360S-RC-536, but provided roughly equivalent facilities of its own.

In HASP II V3, NIH created the shared spool capability for HASP that was used by many mainframe sites. It allowed each HASP system to share a common spool and checkpoint. This enabled workload balancing in a multi-mainframe environment. In HASP II V4, Mellon Bank - Don Greb & Dave Miko moved shared spool to this version and carried it forward into JES2 multi-access spool (IBM's formal support of HASP in MVS). Over 350 copies of the HASP II V4 shared spool mods were distributed around the world. The shared spool Mellon Mods were added to the SHARE distribution process so they could be more widely accessed.

The program was sometimes referred to under various other names, but there is no indication of IBM ever using them in official documents.

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