ReserVec
Encyclopedia
ReserVec was a computerized reservation system developed by Ferranti Canada for Trans-Canada Airlines (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 US 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 Ferranti-Packard 6000
computer, which would later go on to see major sales in Europe as the ICT 1904
.
, 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 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 himself 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 new "transactor" (terminal) that used a new punched card
system. Booking agents at the ticketing offices marked the cards with pencil, for 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. The computer itself would be built using transistor-based logic, thereby eliminating downtime due to tube burnout. Such a system had first been proposed in order to improve the reliability of the DATAR
system Ferranti had built for the Canadian Navy, and they were convinced of its practicality.
TCA was interested, and provided $75,000 for the construction of six prototype transactors. In 1957 these were attached to FERUT over telephone lines and the experimental booking program run again. The demonstration was a complete success; users could quickly feed in requests and Ferut was able to book, change, query and cancel flights at speeds that made the Reservisor look terribly slow.
had also been considered. The new machine was based on a 25-bit word, using one bit for parity
checking and 24 bits for data, and was equipped with 4,096 words of core memory, later expanded to 8,192 words. Storage consisted of five magnetic drums (one was a spare) with 32,768 25-bit words each, and six tape units. Simple load balancing software routed requests across two CPUs, known as Castor and Pollux, the computer as a whole thus becoming Gemini. An internal TCA contest in late 1960 to name the system as a whole resulted in ReserVec for Reservations Electronically Controlled.
Installation of the transactors started in April 1961, followed by the computer in the Toronto booking office in August. The system was brought up for testing on October 18th, 1961, connecting additional ticketting offices as the transactors were installed over the next year. By August 1962 the system was complete, and the switch-over from the manual systems to ReserVec was completed on January 24, 1963. Use of ReserVec reduced the head count at the booking office from 230 to 90, and allowed for the sale of thousands of telephone lines formerly needed to reach the human operators. Total turnaround from request to response could be as short as a second, although under load it might drop to two seconds at the worst. The system as a whole could process 10 transactions a second.
It is interesting to compare the system with SABRE
, being deployed at about the same time by American Airlines. SABRE was first started as an experimental effort in 1953, and a formal development contract signed in 1957. The system was first turned on in 1960, and took over booking functions in December 1964. So while the two projects started at the same time, ReserVec was completed almost two years earlier. While the ReserVec cost $4 million, SABRE was ten times that. Equally interesting is that while the SABRE CPU was about ten times faster, ReserVec handled 80-100,000 transactions a day with a maximum two second delay, while SABRE handled only 26,000 with delays of up to three seconds.
Unlike SABRE, however, ReserVec did not store passenger information, which had to be processed manually. In order to address this need, TCA added a second system known as Pioneer, which could link ReserVec's three letter passenger codes with the full passenger records held on a Burroughs D-82 computer (originally designed for US military use). Pioneers were installed only in the Toronto and Montreal offices, smaller offices continued using paper records for user info.
ReserVec ran all of TCA's reservations for nine years, with an average downtime of only 120 seconds a year. Originally designed for only 60,000 transactions a day, it was already processing 80 to 100,000 when it was first turned on, and over 600,000 by 1970. Retroactively named ReserVec I, the system was finally replaced at the end of 1970 by a new Univac
-based system known as ReserVec II, which featured small computer terminal
s replacing the punched card systems.
Nevertheless the work did not go to waste. The engineering team convinced local management to support the development of a business computer aimed at the low-end of the mainframe
market. They expanded the ReserVec system with additional hardware to directly support multitasking
and various changes to make the system highly modular, making it more attractive to a wider variety of users. Sales of the new Ferranti-Packard 6000
were just starting when the UK headquarters used the design to sweeten the deal when selling off their UK computer divisions, handing the design to the ICT
who took over production. This was much to the chagrin of the Canadian staff, most of whom quit in disgust. The FP-6000 became the ICT 1904, one of a line of similar machines which sold over 3,000 during the 1960s and 70s.
Air Canada
Air Canada is the flag carrier and largest airline of Canada. The airline, founded in 1936, provides scheduled and charter air transport for passengers and cargo to 178 destinations worldwide. It is the world's tenth largest passenger airline by number of destinations, and the airline is a...
) in the late 1950s. It appears to be the first such system ever developed, predating the more famous SABRE
Sabre (computer system)
Sabre Global Distribution System , owned by Sabre Holdings, is used by more than 55,000 travel agencies around the world with more than 400 airlines, 88,000 hotels, 24 car rental brands, and 13 cruise lines...
system in the US 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
Transistor computer
A transistor computer is a computer which uses discrete transistors instead of vacuum tubes. The "first generation" of electronic computers used vacuum tubes, which generated large amounts of heat, were bulky, and were unreliable. A "second generation" of computers, through the late 1950s and...
were put to good use in Ferranti-Packard 6000
Ferranti-Packard 6000
The FP-6000 was a second generation mainframe computer developed and built by Ferranti-Packard in the early 1960s. It is particularly notable for supporting multitasking, being one of the first commercial machines to do so...
computer, which would later go on to see major sales in Europe as the ICT 1904
ICT 1900 series
ICT 1900 was the name given to a series of mainframe computers released by International Computers and Tabulators and later International Computers Limited during the 1960s and '70s...
.
Background
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 TorontoToronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...
, 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
American Airlines
American Airlines, Inc. is the world's fourth-largest airline in passenger miles transported and operating revenues. American Airlines is a subsidiary of the AMR Corporation and is headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas adjacent to its largest hub at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport...
decided to tackle this problem through automation
Automation
Automation is the use of control systems and information technologies to reduce the need for human work in the production of goods and services. In the scope of industrialization, automation is a step beyond mechanization...
, introducing the Reservisor
Reservisor
Starting in 1946, American Airlines developed a number of automated airline booking systems known as Reservisor. Although somewhat successful, American's unhappiness with the Reservisor systems led them to develop the computerized SABRE system used to this day....
, 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 experiments
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
University of Toronto
The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...
's FERUT computer, a surplus Manchester Mark 1
Manchester Mark 1
The Manchester Mark 1 was one of the earliest stored-program computers, developed at the Victoria University of Manchester from the Small-Scale Experimental Machine or "Baby" . It was also called the Manchester Automatic Digital Machine, or MADM...
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
Vacuum tube
In electronics, a vacuum tube, electron tube , or thermionic valve , reduced to simply "tube" or "valve" in everyday parlance, is a device that relies on the flow of electric current through a vacuum...
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 himself 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
Robert Watson-Watt
Sir Robert Alexander Watson-Watt, KCB, FRS, FRAeS is considered by many to be the "inventor of radar". Development of radar, initially nameless, was first started elsewhere but greatly expanded on 1 September 1936 when Watson-Watt became...
of radar
Radar
Radar is an object-detection system which uses radio waves to determine the range, altitude, direction, or speed of objects. It can be used to detect aircraft, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor vehicles, weather formations, and terrain. The radar dish or antenna transmits pulses of radio...
fame when he moved to Montreal
Montreal
Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...
at the end of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. 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 new "transactor" (terminal) that used a new punched card
Punched card
A punched card, punch card, IBM card, or Hollerith card is a piece of stiff paper that contains digital information represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions...
system. Booking agents at the ticketing offices marked the cards with pencil, for 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. The computer itself would be built using transistor-based logic, thereby eliminating downtime due to tube burnout. Such a system had first been proposed in order to improve the reliability of the DATAR
DATAR
DATAR, short for Digital Automated Tracking and Resolving, was a pioneering computerized battlefield information system.Development on DATAR was started by the Canadian Navy in partnership with Ferranti Canada in 1949. DATAR combined data from various ships providing commanders with an "overall...
system Ferranti had built for the Canadian Navy, and they were convinced of its practicality.
TCA was interested, and provided $75,000 for the construction of six prototype transactors. In 1957 these were attached to FERUT over telephone lines and the experimental booking program run again. The demonstration was a complete success; users could quickly feed in requests and Ferut was able to book, change, query and cancel flights at speeds that made the Reservisor look terribly slow.
Deployment
There was some further development and planning, but in 1959 TCA placed a $2 million ($12 million in year-2000 dollars) contract for a deployment system consisting of 350 transactors and all the communications equipment to support them in the field. Ferranti also won the contract for the computer system itself, although IBMIBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
had also been considered. The new machine was based on a 25-bit word, using one bit for parity
Parity bit
A parity bit is a bit that is added to ensure that the number of bits with the value one in a set of bits is even or odd. Parity bits are used as the simplest form of error detecting code....
checking and 24 bits for data, and was equipped with 4,096 words of core memory, later expanded to 8,192 words. Storage consisted of five magnetic drums (one was a spare) with 32,768 25-bit words each, and six tape units. Simple load balancing software routed requests across two CPUs, known as Castor and Pollux, the computer as a whole thus becoming Gemini. An internal TCA contest in late 1960 to name the system as a whole resulted in ReserVec for Reservations Electronically Controlled.
Installation of the transactors started in April 1961, followed by the computer in the Toronto booking office in August. The system was brought up for testing on October 18th, 1961, connecting additional ticketting offices as the transactors were installed over the next year. By August 1962 the system was complete, and the switch-over from the manual systems to ReserVec was completed on January 24, 1963. Use of ReserVec reduced the head count at the booking office from 230 to 90, and allowed for the sale of thousands of telephone lines formerly needed to reach the human operators. Total turnaround from request to response could be as short as a second, although under load it might drop to two seconds at the worst. The system as a whole could process 10 transactions a second.
It is interesting to compare the system with SABRE
Sabre (computer system)
Sabre Global Distribution System , owned by Sabre Holdings, is used by more than 55,000 travel agencies around the world with more than 400 airlines, 88,000 hotels, 24 car rental brands, and 13 cruise lines...
, being deployed at about the same time by American Airlines. SABRE was first started as an experimental effort in 1953, and a formal development contract signed in 1957. The system was first turned on in 1960, and took over booking functions in December 1964. So while the two projects started at the same time, ReserVec was completed almost two years earlier. While the ReserVec cost $4 million, SABRE was ten times that. Equally interesting is that while the SABRE CPU was about ten times faster, ReserVec handled 80-100,000 transactions a day with a maximum two second delay, while SABRE handled only 26,000 with delays of up to three seconds.
Unlike SABRE, however, ReserVec did not store passenger information, which had to be processed manually. In order to address this need, TCA added a second system known as Pioneer, which could link ReserVec's three letter passenger codes with the full passenger records held on a Burroughs D-82 computer (originally designed for US military use). Pioneers were installed only in the Toronto and Montreal offices, smaller offices continued using paper records for user info.
ReserVec ran all of TCA's reservations for nine years, with an average downtime of only 120 seconds a year. Originally designed for only 60,000 transactions a day, it was already processing 80 to 100,000 when it was first turned on, and over 600,000 by 1970. Retroactively named ReserVec I, the system was finally replaced at the end of 1970 by a new Univac
UNIVAC
UNIVAC is the name of a business unit and division of the Remington Rand company formed by the 1950 purchase of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, founded four years earlier by ENIAC inventors J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, and the associated line of computers which continues to this day...
-based system known as ReserVec II, which featured small computer terminal
Computer terminal
A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that is used for entering data into, and displaying data from, a computer or a computing system...
s replacing the punched card systems.
Disappointing sales
Ferranti, now as Ferranti-Packard, tried to sell the machine as-is to other airlines. The US market seemed to be entirely wrapped up by IBM and Univac, but there was no comparable system in Europe, where a number of airlines were looking at the US developments with interest. Obviously the Gemini would make an excellent product, and could be sold directly by Ferranti's existing UK-based sales force. Although the Canadian team had long ago given up being surprised by the UK computer division's odd decisions, when they decided not to use the Gemini and instead develop their own it seemed like an obvious insult. In the end the UK system would never be delivered; it was still being developed when Ferranti decided to sell off their entire computer division after years of losses.Nevertheless the work did not go to waste. The engineering team convinced local management to support the development of a business computer aimed at the low-end of the mainframe
Mainframe computer
Mainframes are powerful computers used primarily by corporate and governmental organizations for critical applications, bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing.The term originally referred to the...
market. They expanded the ReserVec system with additional hardware to directly support multitasking
Computer multitasking
In computing, multitasking is a method where multiple tasks, also known as processes, share common processing resources such as a CPU. In the case of a computer with a single CPU, only one task is said to be running at any point in time, meaning that the CPU is actively executing instructions for...
and various changes to make the system highly modular, making it more attractive to a wider variety of users. Sales of the new Ferranti-Packard 6000
Ferranti-Packard 6000
The FP-6000 was a second generation mainframe computer developed and built by Ferranti-Packard in the early 1960s. It is particularly notable for supporting multitasking, being one of the first commercial machines to do so...
were just starting when the UK headquarters used the design to sweeten the deal when selling off their UK computer divisions, handing the design to the ICT
International Computers and Tabulators
International Computers and Tabulators or ICT was formed in 1959 by a merger of the British Tabulating Machine Company and Powers-Samas. In 1963 it also added the business computer divisions of Ferranti...
who took over production. This was much to the chagrin of the Canadian staff, most of whom quit in disgust. The FP-6000 became the ICT 1904, one of a line of similar machines which sold over 3,000 during the 1960s and 70s.