AbstractA general purpose mechanism for the queueing of tasks is an important component in an ‘intelligent satellite’ system interfacing a community of users to a range of computing facilities. The queueing mechanism should provide spooling, warm and cold restarts, the ability to pool common resources (e.g. a number of line printers), a means of servicing the queues on a priority basis, and a flexible control mechanism for the system operators. The implementation of such a system for a small (i.e. 16‐bit) computer system is desc