[GreenKeys] Western Union Technical Review

[John Nagle]

On 4/7/2013 7:51 AM, Jim Haynes wrote:
> On Sat, 6 Apr 2013, John Nagle wrote:
>>   Interestingly, Western Union had a magnetic drum based system
>> as early as i955, but it was for inventory control and made by
>> Teleregister.
>>
> I flew out of LaGuardia around 1963-64 and at the time American Airlines
> was using one of those Teleregister systems for reservations purposes,
> before Sabre came on line.  A class of seat on a flight on a certain day
> was a part number.  Each time they sold a ticket it decreased the
> inventory of that part number.  I remember there were some coded metal
> plates as part of the agent set that translated flight numbers into
> part numbers.

    Yes, that was Reservisor, which is well known in computer history.

    Computers today are stored-program general purpose digital
computers, because it's cheaper to make a general purpose machine
today than a special purpose one. But the break-even point on that
didn't come until the late 1960s.  There were various special purpose
digital computing machines built in the 1940s through the 1960s.
Cryptanalysis, telephone billing, message switching, reservations,
multipliers for tabulating machines, inventory control, bank posting,
and race track odds calculations all had their very own special purpose
technologies.   The major US players were AT&T, Western Union,
Teleregister, American Totalizator, National Cash Register, and IBM.

   All those special purpose technologies were dead ends
once it became possible to build low-cost digital computers.

					John Nagle