The Houston Automatic Spooling Priority Program, commonly known as HASP, was developed by IBM Federal Systems Division contractors at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The developers were Tom Simpson and Bob Crabtree. HASP was a program that ran on a mainframe, and performed supplementary job management, data management, and task management 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 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 mod's were distributed around the world.
The program was sometimes referred to under various other names, but there is no indication of IBM ever using them in official documents.
The program became classified as part of the IBM Type-III Library. It had a competitor, ASP which ran on one mainframe and controlled scheduling of other attached mainframes. ASP later became JES3.
In MVS, HASP became JES2, one of two Job Entry Subsystems. It was many years before the HASP labels were removed from the JES2 source, and the messages issued by JES2 remained prefixed with "$HASP".
Third party vendors developed a variety of 2770/2780/3780 simulators and Multi-leaving implementations for use with HASP and ASP. Some of these vendors incorrectly referred to their products as HASP emulators, but the products were actually nothing but terminals that talked to HASP; they did not perform any of the functions of HASP.
HASP job log output provided a summary of the resources used for the job (output appeared in all caps):