Houston Automatic Spooling Priority

HASP was developed by IBM Federal Systems Division contractors at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. HASP was a program that ran on a separate computer from the mainframe, communicated with the mainframe through a bisync communications protocol, and performed supplementary job management, data management, and task management functions such as: scheduling, control of job flow, and spooling.

In MVS, HASP incorporated RJE and became JES2, one of two versions of the Job Entry Subsystem. It was many years before the HASP labels were removed from the JES2 source, and the messages issued by JES2 remained prefixed with $HASP.