“Yet in the two and one-half seconds between the last word of his request for space and the first word of the agent’s reply he has been the beneficiary of a $30 million computer installation that not only has booked him on the correct flight as far as a year ahead but, once it gets his name, will keep track of his every move along the line-including ordering his meals, his rental cars, or his connecting reservations-until he arrives where he wants to go.” “To the would-be passenger in Los Angeles who phones or drops by the American Airlines ticket counter for a reservation, very little seems to have changed,” Fortune wrote. Fortune magazine marveled in a 1964 article at what Sabre could do. Sabre cut it to seconds.īy the mid-1960s, Sabre became the largest private, real-time data processing system, second in size only to the US government’s system. IS AMERICAN AIRLINE APP AVAILABLE FOR MAC COMPUTERS MANUALThe average time to process a reservation in the old manual card system was 90 minutes. By the end of 1964, this new system was handling 7500 reservations per hour. At first, Sabre just operated in one location, Briarcliff Manor, New York, with two The Sabre reservation system was built in 1960, with lessons learned from IBM’s mid-1950s project to build the gigantic SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) air defense computer system. Blair Smith recommended a joint development project between IBM and American to create a computerized reservation system, and American Airlines president Smith agreed. Watson told Smith to do exactly as the American president requested: tour the reservation center, write a letter with his recommendations-and send a copy to Watson. Then you write me a letter and tell me what we ought to do.’”Īt the training session, Blair Smith saw IBM CEO Thomas Watson Jr. He said, ‘Now, Blair, … when you get through with your school, our reservation center is at LaGuardia Airport. He took out a card and wrote a special phone number on the back. It could even keep a record of the passenger’s name, the passenger’s itinerary, and, if you like, his phone number. Blair Smith knew that American had an older model computer that could only keep track of the number of seats reserved and open on a flight, but could not record anything about who was in those seats.Īs Blair Smith recalled: “I told I was going back to study a computer that had the possibility of doing more than just keeping availability. At the time, airline reservations were written by hand on cards and sorted in boxes-an unwieldy mess as the industry expanded. Smith, the president of American Airlines. He got into a conversation with the man sitting next to him, who turned out to be C.R. Blair Smith, had boarded an American flight from Los Angeles to New York on his way to a training session. Sabre got its start because of a chance meeting in 1953. More than 57,000 travel agencies around the world log into a Sabre desktop each day, and the Sabre system processes more than 42,000 transactions Today, Sabre remains the leading provider of travel technology products and services around the world, The Sabre system is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
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