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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. "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).
All photos courtesy IBM, unless otherwise indicated
