Computer Airline Reservation Systems 1965 - ATT Bell Telephone (IBM, UNIVAC) "Plane Talk"
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- Опубліковано 8 вер 2024
- IBM - UNIVAC: This a classic 1965 video describing the overall Airline tracking and reservation process, presented from the viewpoint of ATT (Bell Telephone). It includes not just the computerized reservation systems (such as IBM's SABRE), but the telephone, teletype, radio, air traffic control and other aspects of how it all works together. A great vintage educational film. You may have seen this before, it is provided here with some improved audio and video. IBM and UNIVAC terminals are shown briefly in the film. Hope you enjoy.
More info at these links:
Sabre: The First Online Reservation System
www.ibm.com/ib...
PANAMAC - PAN AM version of Airline Reservation System
www.panam.org/...
OZARK Air Lines -
• OZARK AIR LINES- Compu...
Glad to know even back then that seat belt extensions were used.
Guess I missed that. Fascinating!
But back then the seats had enough room for that big guy! lol
Considering that touch tone telephone was generally first available November of 1963 having one at home in 65 would be very rare indeed.
Remember the Unisys 90s ad: There are two things you need to run an airline company. One of them are airplanes. The other is information.
And the third is seat belt extensions
3:46 - Oooh, a Convair 880! A glorious airliner!
Things you never hear on an airplane: “That was a wonderful meal.”
Glad you liked it, discount Shelley Winters.
4:45 Born in '65. My mother worked for Hertz at BDL in the early '70s. Sometimes we'd get to run around the place and act crazy the way kids do when we picked her up. Good times.
I miss the Murphy Terminal.
marvelous documentation and insight of technology of the time. So many things we now take for granted, even let it be the very beginning of packet-switched communication, already were in there infancy in 1965. Also i get the impression that people were much more looking forward to the future than nowadays. often have the impression that we are more and more backward oriented, a shame really...
I was born in 1965. Hard to believe people were once so courteous. Especially in light of the present mess..
Well, this film is a dramatization of reality.
Today you can expect crappy to no service due to today's pot smoking employees.
I was born in '65. I still compliment the airline staff for their work. I've been lucky so far I guess.
17:31 "...and we'll be landing Los Angeles..." said with a hard-"g".
My grandfather's generation (born before 1910) said it that way.
The music and mismatched engine sounds at the beginning remind me of Thunderbirds.
Up until about the 1990s, SABRE was still crunching reservations for a variety of airlines.
🎶We've come a long ways, baby!!!🎶
Back.in the day when flying had class. Not like it is today. Chaotic and no regulations.
back when economy cost the equivalent of $1000 to fly from chicago to new york
Sham- I sumarize today’s commercial air travel as chaotic and de-humanizing.
These videos are such a great look back at our history. Thanks for sharing with us!
Thank you. ~ Victor, CHAP
0:46 -- the old Atlanta Hartsfield Airport terminal building. I remember that from when I was a kid in the '70s. They tore it down in either '80 or '81, I think.
Flash forward to the present: They are now using Navitaire (airline reservation) and Smartkargo (cloud-hosted cargo management).
I bet people wish that taking fight was still like this today, I was not born yet when this came out, but it is nice to see what I missed. I like the old lady that was a fine meal, if she was taking a fight today she would be saying something different. Great video
I think you meant "taking flight" : )
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProject Yes some times this android phone word correct changes what I type
Really amazing would be nice to have a system like this today........
The Retro Decade Revival Project will make it all happen.
Good golly, It’s like we’re in the future!!!!
We are we just take it granted :P
Fun fact: The flight crew of United 210 made the cross-country flight with the landing gear extended!
Aviation ticketing is a very conservative industry. In the 00s we were still using early 80s terminals and data switches. It was an incredibly resilient system.
"If it ain't broke...don't fix it " !
I sure remember seeing VT220 like Terminal emulation by PC in use in the 1990s, and they were using text commands damn fast. There was a talk of GUI and they hated the idea.
thanks for the wonderful meal! that's something you will NEVER hear from a passenger these days. flying is a nightmare now
0:45 I'm amused, but not surprised, that you subtitled the copyright date written in Roman numerals. 😹
14:37 - No. 5 Crossbar, a view of the MTC (maintenance test center)
14:47 - Telegraph/Toll test boards
14:53 - Carrier equipment. Interestingly Step by Step telephone switching equipment can be heard operating in the background. This is completely different than the switching system seen at 14:37, so either it was filmed in a different office entirely, or the office seen at 14:37 hosts two different types of telephone exchanges.
Hi Sarah, I think you are correct. This film visits multiple locations and doesn't always say what you are looking at. Would have been nice to know that specifically. Thanks for your info! ~ Victor, CHAP
14:35 is a #5 crossbar. A (then) modern system , which makes it a ILEC (Bell) system. The SxS system must be a largeish PBX or small town system.
In the effort to satisfy requests for new telephone connections for new housing developments and such, the newest equipment was often installed in central offices in either empty space or newly constructed floors or wings of the existing building. They couldn't build the new equipment fast enough to also replace anything. Besides, the old equipment just needed a little maintenance to produce a continuing profit.
Ahoy, Sarah! Love your work at the Connections Museum. I hope I can visit the Seattle area soon and meet you and the gang one of these Sundays.
The makers of the movie "Airplane" must have been inspired by this film.
_Airplane_ is actually a parody of the 1957 film _Zero Hour!_ The script originally stayed close to the dialog and plot of _Zero Hour!_
still baffles me they were able to use computer systems that had no visual output whatsoever other than an occasional printout, and could figure which of all those switches to flip to make the computer do what they wanted. I've used computers since I was 5, when the PC was still new, and I have mad respect for anyone who had to use the old switchboard computers to do their job
Hi TheSteelRodent, yes, good point. When the VDT's (visual display terminals) and computer monitors came out, life got a whole lot easier! And the gamers took off like a rocket! : )
The first Terminal for IBM 360 had a crazy price. Only NSA etc could afford it. IBM 2250. $2 million in 2023 prices.
I like when the announcement came in the airport they showed an air conditioning vent as if they thought it was a speaker. Ha ha
Much more people worked for the process.
I find this fascinating
videox22ify, thanks very much for your feedback! Happy to share this bit of vintage airline history too. ~
Great vídeo, nice.
Uranyo, thank you. Glad you liked it. ~ Victor, at CHAP
It's such a calm and ordered setup. Which doesn't feel real at all. 😂😆😬
Telecom, computers, and air travel!
No traffic control tower has ever had such sound clarity.
All that equipment is now useless with it haveing nothing to talk to. Thanks for the video.
Most fascinating.
still in use as of today 😅
Men wearing hats.
What they showed as a loudspeaker was an air vent. Oh well. :)
You caught that too!!
@@PatrickRosenbalm sure looks like an air vent!
9:49 so this has been around for a looong time...but how much classier everyone was (and thinner -- even the fat ones)!
Since this film was made there's been almost 3 generations. The young should realize that those previous generations and those before it have been running the world...flying jets, making computers, driving cars...there was a world before you were born. We were landing these large planes, eating full meals on the planes rather than a Coke and a bag of peanuts, men wore suits, women skirts and heels rather than pajama bottoms. Flying has morphed from a classy adventure into a bus ride. Despite the "sell" of the ATT film about the airline system, people were more polite...kind of like they were a couple of months after 911. You didn't get a lot of people one brick shy of a load claiming flight attendants are not real. Although the "Me Generation" was supposedly several decades ago...we are truly in the "ME...and F everyone else generation".
From Wikipedia:
“Although rosy retrospection is a cognitive bias, which distorts a person's view of reality to some extent, some people theorize that it may in part serve a useful purpose in increasing self-esteem and a person's overall sense of well-being.”
Some portions of the code still runs. Mainframe is a very different universe.
Ah yes, everyone having a good laugh at the portly fellow.. 😂😂.
Nice!! :-)
Robert, Thanks for the visit. ~
I just wonder how does scenario write `start with jet noise` at the beginning? ;-)
Everyone got dressed up, were polite to each other and the food and beverages were included in the air fare...and that stuff also happened when they weren't shooting documentaries. Today, the flying experience would seem odd if the cops didn't come to the gate at least once to arrest a drunk passenger shouting racial slurs or making TicTok videos. That's my daily reality managing an airport in 2023.
Rumor has it Southwest is still using these systems today. lol
Yes, probably so.
This was almost 57 years ago, imagine that the young adults in their early 20's would now be approaching their 90's or have past on. Imagine an Apple MacBook Pro costing, oh lets say $4000 USD and being thousands or millions of times faster and more powerful than the multi-million dollar mainframe computers that were the wonder of there day.
Second breakfast?
wow
People were much better dressed back then.
Looks like Dulles
I prefer the old ATC, they seemed to know where everything was. Planes, people and luggage.
No one was carrying heavy over sized carry on at that time huh.. LOL
What? No one is wearing their pajamas at the airport or on the airplane?
Not that it's any big deal, but just two years after this film documentary Heavy Metal music was invented. Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. Let's not forget Shock rock like Alice Cooper. All of this in one decade.
17:48 so wait... homes had touch tone, while all the airports still had to make due with rotary dial devices?
rotary phones were nearly impossible to wear out, and in many cases they had better sound quality
@@thesteelrodent1796 Touch Tone service costed extra dollars per month per line. For a business that has has hundreds or even thousands of lines, that would be a big monthly expense. Also, the type of PBX the business owns or rents dictate whether the telephone sets connected to the PBX are rotary or Touch Tone. The business I worked for in the 1980s still had a step-by-step PBX system, so only rotary phones can be used.
You had to pay an extra monthly fee for touch-tone through the 80's and your local switch had to support it. Thus, not many people had touch-tone, so many people were unfamiliar with it, more so in airports where people are from different countries. The first touch tone public phones weren't made until the late 70's, and even then, they kept making rotary public phones again due to not all switches supporting it.
Was this originally black and white?
Hi Graham, thanks for your question. I believe the original was a color film, but our digital copy has poor color resolution and we have been looking for a cleaner original 16mm film to work with. That would make us quite happy. ~ Thanks! ~ Hunter, CHAP
Thank you. Really enjoyed the video. It looked like it had been automatically colourised - that seems to be a fad at the moment. It's interesting to see how things once were. I am amazed they were so advanced at reservations back then. Thanks again.
And zero security required ...
Did they really have to superimpose “1965”? Even though the copyright date is displayed.
Hi William, good question. The film shows the original copyright in very small type, in Roman Numerals. These are often difficult to see for viewers who watch these videos on their small smart phone screens. We put the date in larger type for a few seconds to help viewers see the date of the film for historical purposes. That was our thinking on that. Thanks for the question though. : ) ~ VK
Why is the color in this feature so unnatural? To show something so seemingly modern, I would have thought they would have used Technicolor.
Non-Technicolor film print chemistry often fades with time. And the rate of fade for each color layer is asymmetrical- resulting in the odd colorimetry that you see. I work for a film restoration company and we expend lots of effort (and time/money) to digitally correct those defects in what I call "distressed film." My hands were automatically reaching for the color controls to correct the "crushed" black levels and incorrect mid-tone "gamma" settings as if the images were on our video monitors.
Good info! Thank you! ~ Victor, CHAP
its 5 am, you know what that means
?
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProject fall down a rabbit hole of old bell videos
Tens of thousands of jobs which are no longer needed
Today you'd tell the stewardess as you were getting off the plane, just so you know, I'll never get on a plane again.
How times have changed!
Back when people wore fancy clothes to fly!
Not fancy clothes at all. Men dressed like gentlemen and women dressed like a lady…. It’s called class. I think if people today dressed the same as back then and even the way they did in the 50s it mentally would make a difference in everyday people today. Just in day to day life!
@@Vapnvibes
Absolutely !
5:12 why waste time calling your family when you could just shoot a text
Wish the controllers would speak that slow. Now they talk so fast.
FORTRAN PASCAL
Everyone's hair looked so plastic! LOL!
Such a rosy picture...and probably very heinously unreal. I'm imagining understaffed ticket reservationists:
1. Hurriedly jotting down (on foolscap rapidly becoming more scarce): contact, from and to airway info.
2. Collapsing in tears because, _hours later_, the 'super'computer is still loading needed info into its woefully small RAM buffer to re-sequence and order the requests against an intersection of available flights. . .
3. Trying to re-read, _with little success_, their hurried scribbles from the foolscap, made worse because they ran out of writable space. And the info is hours ago, so memory doesn't help.
7:41 Everything is la-la-land, Apple Pie, and sunshine until you notice the airplane's windows are still square. And they're all gonna die.