A look at the origins of computerized airline booking systems, tracing back to a 1953 conversation between American Airlines president C.R. Smith and an IBM salesman on a cross-country flight. By the mid-1950s, American Airlines was drowning in manual reservation processes using index cards, taking up to 90 minutes to confirm a single transatlantic booking. The IBM-American Airlines partnership formalized in 1959 produced SABRE (Semi-Automated Business Research Environment), which went live in 1964 and became the foundation for today's Global Distribution Systems that process tens of thousands of flight bookings per second. The piece contextualizes SABRE's launch alongside other computing milestones like IBM System/360 and notes that this legacy infrastructure is still in use today.
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