1. A series of tasks automatically executed, one after the other, by the computer. In mainframe data processing during the 1950s and 1960s, the job queue was literallly a queue, or line of people waiting to have their programs run. With interactive, multi-user computing and personal computing, you usually don't need to line up to get your work done (although jobs can still back up at a busy printer). The term is still used in WordPerfect, for example, where you can assign a job number to several files you want to print, and the program prints the files in the order you assign. From QUECID