[HN Gopher] A 1958 UNIVAC airline reservation system
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A 1958 UNIVAC airline reservation system
Author : finite_jest
Score : 60 points
Date : 2021-11-05 10:47 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (philip.greenspun.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (philip.greenspun.com)
| pstuart wrote:
| Tangential, but Greenspun seems to have gone into full on crank
| mode.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| I wonder how many transactions per second the same amount of
| money, inflation adjusted, can buy nowadays?
| pinewurst wrote:
| https://sci-hub.se/10.1145/1458043.1458075
| pinko wrote:
| Mods: this is a better link than the OP.
| wolfgang42 wrote:
| My favorite early airline reservation system (mainly because of
| the name) is the 1952 "Magnetronic Reservisor", which was (IIRC,
| I read a paper about this a few years ago but can't seem to find
| it now) an electromechanical system built around a magnetic drum,
| but with special-purpose control circuitry rather than a general-
| purpose computer. Reading about the design made me very grateful
| that I can just use a SQL database rather than having to design
| my schema in hardware.
| Animats wrote:
| What we call a computer today is a stored program, general
| purpose, electronic digital computer. This was a known goal
| before WWII, at least within IBM. But each of those hardware
| features had to be developed. So, along the way, there were
| things like this reservation system which checked only some of
| the boxes on that list.
|
| That was the heyday of special-purpose systems. Reservisor,
| Plan 55-A (Western Union's Sendmail made with paper tape and
| relays), Teleregister (stock market quotations), American
| Totalizator (racetrack systems), special systems for railroads,
| mechanically programmable Teletype "stunt boxes", plugboard-
| wired fire dispatching systems...
|
| IBM had electronic arithmetic in test before WWII. But memory
| was hard. You needed something to store each bit, and that
| meant building a huge number of somethings. General purpose
| stored program computing had to wait until someone developed
| something cheap enough, large enough, and fast enough to store
| the program. Early electronic memory devices were the Williams
| tube (too expensive, not big enough), delay lines (too slow),
| and magnetic drums (too slow). Magnetic core finally got
| computing moving, but core was a million dollars a megabyte as
| late as 1970.
|
| Here's an introduction to the UNIVAC File Computer.[1] The
| program was on a magnetic drum, so you only got maybe one or
| two instructions per rev. To speed things up, they had a
| plugboard, so you could wire up small subroutines to be
| triggered from a single instruction from the drum. Again, you
| see the struggle against memory cost and slow memory speed.
|
| UNIVAC later hired Gen. Leslie Groves from the Manhattan
| Project. He thought big. The result was the UNIVAC 1103, the
| largest vacuum tube computer ever built as a commercial
| product. That monster came out in 1953. Stored programs in
| random access memory at last. The 1103 had everything you
| needed in a computer except affordability. Williams tube random
| access memory (1024 words of 36 bits each), large numbers of
| tape drives, peripherals, etc. They didn't sell many, but the
| successors (1103A, core memory, 1105, some transistors, 1107,
| all transistors) became more useful.
|
| So, as I've mentioned before, it's not the lack of a
| theoretical concept of stored program computing that held back
| early computing. It was developing something in which to store
| the program and data.
|
| [1] http://s3data.computerhistory.org/brochures/univac.file-
| comp...
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> Early electronic memory devices were the Williams tube
| (too expensive, not big enough), delay lines (too slow), and
| magnetic drums (too slow).
|
| Drum memory was slow but you could time things so that one
| instruction finished processing just as the next one reached
| the head. Can't do that with core :P
| dmbaggett wrote:
| I'm a co-founder of ITA Software (now Google Flights), and people
| often assume that we at ITA thought Sabre and predecessors like
| the one mentioned here were crap. On the contrary: I, at least,
| think they were among the greatest software achievements of their
| era.
|
| What was less impressive was airlines still relying on the same
| code 40+ years later: the challenge we set for ourselves was to
| bring the power engendered by all those years of hardware
| improvement (and Linux boxes vs mainframes) to bear on the travel
| industry. And we did that successfully for fare search!
|
| We then tried and failed to do the same for the much larger
| challenge of the reservation system (think airline operating
| system).
|
| I distinctly remember philg (OP) visiting ITA's crappy office in
| Kendall Square circa 1998, telling us we were all wasting our
| time trying to improve airline IT. In retrospect it's "a
| cautionary tale" (quoting Phil's post): knowledgeable people
| often overstate the advantages of the incumbents and underplay
| the value of luck and timing to startups.
| ahefner wrote:
| Did you ever consider starting a small airline as customer #0
| for the reservation system?
| Marazan wrote:
| You don't make money in the airline industry by being an
| airline.
| ghaff wrote:
| I don't know if it's still true. Probably not. But at one
| point in the past 10 or 15 years I heard the (what seemed
| to me credible) claim that, taken as a whole, the
| commercial airline industry had never made money.
| rchowe wrote:
| ITA Matrix is a great tool for a power user to search for
| flights, and the time bar view is brilliant. Google's done a
| pretty good job with Google Flights, but there are still crazy
| things you can build in ITA Matrix that it's tough to find
| anywhere else (unless you are/know a travel agent and/or have a
| GDS). I've said for a while that if Google ever kills off
| matrix.itasoftware.com I would build a replica.
| pinko wrote:
| If Google does ever kills off matrix.itasoftware.com, and you
| build a replica, I would pay for it and/or help you to the
| extent possible.
| 3dbrows wrote:
| As someone who worked on timetabling databases and pricing
| services at Skyscanner, I appreciate just what a phenomenal
| achievement ITA is. Very well done sir.
|
| There is still so, so much innovation that the flights travel
| industry is ripe for.
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