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ReserVec
ReserVec was a computerized reservation system developed by Ferranti Canada for Trans-Canada Air Lines (TCA, today's Air Canada) in the late 1950s. It appears to be the first such system ever developed, predating the more famous SABRE system in the United States by about two years. Although Ferranti had high hopes, that the system would be used by other airlines, no further sales were forthcoming and development of the system ended. Major portions of the transistor-based circuit design were put to good use in the Ferranti-Packard 6000 computer, which would later go on to see major sales in Europe as the ICT 1904.
In the early 1950s the airline industry was undergoing explosive growth. A serious limiting factor was the time taken to make a single booking, which could take upwards of 90 minutes in total. TCA found their bookings typically involved between three and seven calls to the centralized booking centre in Toronto, where telephone operators would scan flight status displayed on a huge board showing all scheduled flights one month into the future. Bookings past that time could not be made, nor could an agent reliably know anything other than if the flight was full or not – to book two seats was much more complex, requiring the operator to find the "flight card" for that flight in a filing cabinet.
In 1946 American Airlines decided to tackle this problem through automation, introducing the Reservisor, a simple electromechanical computer based on telephone switching systems. Newer versions of the Reservisor included magnetic drum systems for storing flight information further into the future. The ultimate version of the system, the Magnetronic Reservisor, was installed in 1956 and could store data for 2,000 flights a day up to one month into the future. Reservisors were later sold to a number of airlines, as well as Sheraton for hotel bookings, and Goodyear for inventory control.
TCA was aware of the Reservisor, but was unimpressed by its limited capabilities in terms of information it could store, and even more by the failure rate, which was essentially "constant". Nor did the Reservisor really change the way the reservations system worked; ticket agents still had to call central booking and talk (typically through an intermediary) to a Reservisor operator to answer queries.
TCA asked one of their communications engineers, Lyman Richardson, to study the booking problem, and he quickly came to the opinion that a computerized solution was the only one worth studying. TCA then entered into an agreement to build a prototype system on the University of Toronto's FERUT computer, a surplus Manchester Mark 1 computer they had received in 1952 when the UK's nuclear weapons laboratories had to abandon it after budget cuts.
The FERUT-based system was demonstrated in 1953 and was a qualified success; while the programmed logic and data storage/retrieval worked well, input/output was a serious bottleneck that seemed to make the system no better than the mechanical Reservisor. Furthermore, the Ferut was vacuum tube based, and thus no more reliable than the Reservisor, TCA's major concern prior to the experiment.
Richardson was convinced that the basic concept was sound, and formed a team of him and several engineers from the university's Computation Center, operating under the aegis of Adalia Ltd., a consulting firm set up by Robert Watson-Watt of radar fame when he moved to Montreal at the end of World War II. They became involved with the newly-forming electronics group at Ferranti Canada, who felt they had a solution to the input/output and reliability problems.
Ferranti proposed a "transactor" (terminal) that used a custom punched card system. Booking agents at the ticketing offices marked the cards with a pencil to select various checkboxes, then inserted it into the transactor which read the marks and punched those codes onto the edge of the card. Cards would then be collected from any number of operators and fed into a normal card reader, which would read them over telephone lines at "high speed" directly into the central booking computer.
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ReserVec AI simulator
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ReserVec
ReserVec was a computerized reservation system developed by Ferranti Canada for Trans-Canada Air Lines (TCA, today's Air Canada) in the late 1950s. It appears to be the first such system ever developed, predating the more famous SABRE system in the United States by about two years. Although Ferranti had high hopes, that the system would be used by other airlines, no further sales were forthcoming and development of the system ended. Major portions of the transistor-based circuit design were put to good use in the Ferranti-Packard 6000 computer, which would later go on to see major sales in Europe as the ICT 1904.
In the early 1950s the airline industry was undergoing explosive growth. A serious limiting factor was the time taken to make a single booking, which could take upwards of 90 minutes in total. TCA found their bookings typically involved between three and seven calls to the centralized booking centre in Toronto, where telephone operators would scan flight status displayed on a huge board showing all scheduled flights one month into the future. Bookings past that time could not be made, nor could an agent reliably know anything other than if the flight was full or not – to book two seats was much more complex, requiring the operator to find the "flight card" for that flight in a filing cabinet.
In 1946 American Airlines decided to tackle this problem through automation, introducing the Reservisor, a simple electromechanical computer based on telephone switching systems. Newer versions of the Reservisor included magnetic drum systems for storing flight information further into the future. The ultimate version of the system, the Magnetronic Reservisor, was installed in 1956 and could store data for 2,000 flights a day up to one month into the future. Reservisors were later sold to a number of airlines, as well as Sheraton for hotel bookings, and Goodyear for inventory control.
TCA was aware of the Reservisor, but was unimpressed by its limited capabilities in terms of information it could store, and even more by the failure rate, which was essentially "constant". Nor did the Reservisor really change the way the reservations system worked; ticket agents still had to call central booking and talk (typically through an intermediary) to a Reservisor operator to answer queries.
TCA asked one of their communications engineers, Lyman Richardson, to study the booking problem, and he quickly came to the opinion that a computerized solution was the only one worth studying. TCA then entered into an agreement to build a prototype system on the University of Toronto's FERUT computer, a surplus Manchester Mark 1 computer they had received in 1952 when the UK's nuclear weapons laboratories had to abandon it after budget cuts.
The FERUT-based system was demonstrated in 1953 and was a qualified success; while the programmed logic and data storage/retrieval worked well, input/output was a serious bottleneck that seemed to make the system no better than the mechanical Reservisor. Furthermore, the Ferut was vacuum tube based, and thus no more reliable than the Reservisor, TCA's major concern prior to the experiment.
Richardson was convinced that the basic concept was sound, and formed a team of him and several engineers from the university's Computation Center, operating under the aegis of Adalia Ltd., a consulting firm set up by Robert Watson-Watt of radar fame when he moved to Montreal at the end of World War II. They became involved with the newly-forming electronics group at Ferranti Canada, who felt they had a solution to the input/output and reliability problems.
Ferranti proposed a "transactor" (terminal) that used a custom punched card system. Booking agents at the ticketing offices marked the cards with a pencil to select various checkboxes, then inserted it into the transactor which read the marks and punched those codes onto the edge of the card. Cards would then be collected from any number of operators and fed into a normal card reader, which would read them over telephone lines at "high speed" directly into the central booking computer.