Gallery: Forget the Booze. The Mad Men's Best Friend Was SABRE
01sabre-color
In the summer of 1953, an eager IBM salesman named Blair Smith boarded an American Airlines flight in Los Angeles bound for New York. He sat at the back of the plane, next to an unshaven man in rumpled clothes -- also named Smith -- and they got to talking. The unshaven man turned out to be a "master conversationalist," Blair Smith [remembered years later.](http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/107637/1/oh034rbs.pdf) "Within thirty minutes he knew my life story, and I only knew his name was Smith and his shirt was dirty and he needed a shave." He also turned out to be the president of American Airlines, C.R. Smith, who was in the habit of flying from coast to coast without a shaving kit or a change of clothes. And by the time the 10-hour flight to New York was over, Blair Smith and C.R. Smith had started the ball rolling on what became a six-year research and development project codenamed the Semi-Automatic Business Environment Research, or SABER. Later on, with the last two letters switched for copyright reasons, that system reinvented the way we travel. And it shook up computer science too. Today, SABRE is still the system that drives many of the airline reservations around the world, but few remember what an impact it had on the rise of the computer age. Here, we give you a brief history of this seminal system, complete with Brylcreem and pointy glasses and punchcards (see images above).
021lazysusan
Before SABRE, American Airlines reservationists kept track of travelers in much the same way that short-order cooks keep track of breakfast orders. They used lazy susans like this one -- and doesn't that look fun. It was a clumsy, ineffective system that was costing American money. Airplanes were flying with empty seats, and about 80 percent of them were because of bookkeeping errors in the lazy susans. *Photo: SABRE*
032sabrecomputer
SABRE's first system was comprised of two IBM 7090 mainframe computers, set up in Briarcliff Manor, New York. Born in 1961, it connected 1,500 terminals across the U.S. and Canada. The hardware alone cost about $30 million -- or $230 million in 2012 dollars -- making it the biggest order IBM had received, outside of [government contracts.](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/06/how-social-security-saved-ibm/) *Photo: SABRE*
04sabre-photo1
An American Airlines operator sitting at a prototype of the SABRE ticket agent console poses next to 20,000 airplane tickets. That represented one day of American Airline ticket sales back in the early 1960s. Being able to have instant updates to its seat inventory and passenger information gave American a big competitive advantage. Soon other airlines would adopt SABRE too.
05sabre
American Airlines reservationists connected remotely to the IBM 7090 mainframes in Briarcliff Manor, New York. For that, IBM engineers developed a frequency modulation data transmission system to work over AT&T's lines. By the end of 1965, SABRE was handling 7,500 reservations per hour. To get a sense of how much more efficient it was: It took American 90 minutes to process a new reservation under the lazy-susan system. With SABRE, this could be done in seconds.
06sabre-photo2
An early 1960s demonstration of SABRE at IBM's Place Vendome, Paris, office. Connecting to IBM's Mohansic research lab, there was a three-second lag as this operator queried the mainframe. After American was up and running, Pan American and Delta purchased the system too.
07sabre-sept-1967
Take a tour of a SABRE console. The agent places a coded card with a list of flights to the destination airport to the right of the console's buttons. By pressing a "need" button, the agent queries SABRE's New York reservation center. The lights, located just right of the buttons, light up if the requested flight is unavailable. The agent uses the keyboard to enter the customer's name and personal information.
08sabre-photo4-presentation-nov1966
A SABRE presentation by IBM at the Public Relations Society of America.
09sabre-sept-1966
Passengers wait to check into an American Airlines flight in 1966. They had computerized airline reservations back then, but not rollerbags.
10delta-sabre
Delta Air Lines President C.E. Woolman (left) and IBM's T.V. Learson get a SABRE demo.
11sabre-logo
Today, in the age of online reservations, SABRE can be used to book flights on hundreds of airlines. No longer part of American Airlines, its data center has moved out of New York and is spread across three facilities. Though SABRE now uses thousands of Linux blade servers, the IBM mainframe is still at its core. In fact, SABRE CIO Robert Wiseman says that while SABRE has been completely rewritten since the 1960s, the way a SABRE booking record is set up still owes a lot to Blair Smith and his team of developers. "There are certain basic concepts that we use that were based on the original system," he says.
