Which of the following is an example of a spooled device ?
A line printer used to print the output of a number of jobs is an example of a spooled device.
Spool is an acronym for simultaneous peripheral operations on-line. Spooling is a process in which data is temporarily held to be used and executed by a device, program or the system. Data is sent to and stored in memory or other volatile storage until the program or computer requests it for execution.
Spooling works like a typical request queue or spool where data, instructions and processes from multiple sources are accumulated for execution later on.
The most common use of spooling is printing: documents formatted for printing are stored in a queue at the speed of the computer, then retrieved and printed at the speed of the printer. Multiple processes can write documents to the spool without waiting, and can then perform other tasks, while the "spooler" process operates the printer.