Supply management - Computerization

During this period of rapid growth, the airlines, without the advantage of computerization were forced to systematize their airline operations.The
systems they developed included many of the trip components that are still in use today. But systemization could only do so much in terms of
streamlining inventory and passenger management challenges. In the early 1950s airlines began to look seriously at tools for automating the booking
process which, at the time, would take airline agents upwards of 90 minutes per customer booking to complete. The jet age was rapidly approaching
and with it, the prospect of having to process millions of new passengers by hand. In 1952, American Airlines installed the Magnetronic Reservisor,
an electromechanical system of vacuum tubes and a magnetic storage drum that allowed the airline to store seat availability on a centralized platform

Although the reservisor helped to reduce the time required to check availability and could store 31 days of availability for over 2,000 flights, it was
still a largely manual process to book seats and required a reservisor agent to query the system.

Around the same time, TCA (Trans Canada Airlines) in conjunction with the University of Toronto and Ferrant Systems developed the world’s first
computerized reservation system, known as the Reservec, which stood for Reservations Electronically Controlled. American Airlines, which was
aware of the early Reservec success, invested in the development of their own computerized reservation system in partnership with IBM

The Sabre system was launched two years later at a cost of almost ten times that of the competing Reservec system. Despite being a superior
technology, Reservec didn’t see the same commercial success as Sabre because it was not able to effectively enter the IBM-controlled US market.

The success, however, of both Reservec and Sabre promoted other airlines to develop their own computerized reservation platforms.

In a very short period the Deltamatic, DATAS, Apollo, and PARS were up and running in the 1960s.