Technology Takes Flight

Computerworld - It's 1960. Gas costs about 30 cents a gallon. Only big business, government and academia own computers. The first phones to use buttons instead of a rotary dial are still three years away. And American Airlines Inc. and IBM are working on a revolutionary idea.
Their plan was to use computers to automate the process of reserving airline seats. Their brainchild was called Semi-Automatic Business Research Environment, or Sabre, and it pioneered e-commerce 30 years before the Web and helped make air travel accessible to the average person by tracking ever-growing numbers of flights and fares.
Before Sabre, American used a system based on computer cards and teletypes to handle reservations. According to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, processing a round-trip reservation between New York and Buffalo required the efforts of 12 people, at least 15 procedural steps and up to three hours.
By 1998, Sabre had evolved into a global distribution system (GDS) for travel information, reservations and transactions, connecting more than 30,000 travel agents and 3 million online customers with 400 airlines, 50 car-rental companies, 35,000 hotels and dozens of railways, tour companies, ferries and cruise lines. In 1964, the year Sabre was launched, there were 79 million airplane boardings in the U.S. Spurred in part by the ability of computers to track an explosion in fares, routes and flights, that number had risen to 560 million in 1998.
"[Online reservations] enabled airlines to grow rapidly to serve the expanding demand of the expanding business world," says Richard Eastman, president of The Eastman Group Inc., a Newport Beach, Calif.-based developer of travel industry software. It allowed the airlines to manage their inventory of seats faster and more accurately, with lower bookkeeping costs, he says. And through electronic settlement of ticket purchases, the reservation systems allowed airlines to get paid for tickets more quickly.
Now Web-based systems allow any customer with a PC to conduct sophisticated fare comparisons and, in some cases, link directly with travel providers without relying on a GDS. As a result, Sabre and its competitors, faced with dwindling demand for their expensive services, are selling off the GDS parts of their businesses and scrambling to update their technology.
At the start, American's Sabre, United Air Lines Inc.'s Apollo, TWA's WorldSpan and Amadeus (originally a partnership of European airlines) were internal "inventory" systems, owned by the airlines, installed only at airports and airline ticket offices and used to track each airline's seats, flights and other operational information.
The first version of Sabre was based