IBM Airline Control Program, or ACP, is a discontinued
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...
developed by
IBM beginning about 1965. In contrast to previous
airline
An airline is a company that provides air transport services for traveling passengers and freight. Airlines use aircraft to supply these services and may form partnerships or alliances with other airlines for codeshare agreements, in wh ...
transaction processing system
Transaction processing is a way of computing that divides work into individual, indivisible operations, called transactions. A transaction processing system (TPS) is a software system, or software/ hardware combination, that supports transaction ...
s, the most notable aspect of ACP is that it was designed to run on most models of the
IBM System/360 mainframe computer family. This departed from the earlier model in which each airline had a different, machine-specific transaction system.
Overview
Development began with ''
SABRE
A sabre ( French: sabĘ or saber in American English) is a type of backsword with a curved blade associated with the light cavalry of the early modern and Napoleonic periods. Originally associated with Central European cavalry such as th ...
(Semi-Automatic Business Research Environment)'', ''Deltamatic'', and ''PANAMAC''. From these, the ''
Programmed Airline Reservations System
Programmed Airline Reservations System (PARS) is an IBM proprietary large scale airline reservation application, a computer reservations system, executing under the control of IBM Airline Control Program (ACP) (and later its successor, Transact ...
(PARS)'' was developed. In 1969 the control program, ''ACP'', was separated from PARS. PARS kept the functions for processing
airline
An airline is a company that provides air transport services for traveling passengers and freight. Airlines use aircraft to supply these services and may form partnerships or alliances with other airlines for codeshare agreements, in wh ...
reservations and related data.
In December 1979, ACP became known as ACP/TPF and then just
TPF (Transaction Processing Facility).
The transaction operating system became more widely implemented by businesses other than the major airlines, such as online credit card processing, hotel and rental car reservations, police emergency response systems, and package delivery systems.
The last "free" release of ACP, 9.2.1, was intended for use in bank card and similar applications. It was shipped on a "
mini-reel" which contained a complete ACP system and its libraries for restoration to
IBM 3340 disk drives. From that complete system one could easily create derivative works. A
hypervisor
A hypervisor (also known as a virtual machine monitor, VMM, or virtualizer) is a type of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor runs one or more virtual machines is called ...
was included, which allowed OS/370
VS1 or VS2 (
SVS or
MVS
Multiple Virtual Storage, more commonly called MVS, was the most commonly used operating system on the System/370 and System/390 IBM mainframe computers. IBM developed MVS, along with OS/VS1 and SVS, as a successor to OS/360. It is unrelated ...
) to be run as a "guest" OS under ACP itself. The end-user documentation, which was shipped with the tape, took almost 60 linear inches of shelf space.
See also
''IBM Airline Control System (ALCS)'', a variant of TPF specially designed to provide all the benefits of TPF (very high speed, high volume, high availability transaction processing) but with the advantages such as easier integration into the data center offered by running on a standard IBM operating system platform.
See also
*
Timeline of operating systems
This article presents a timeline of events in the history of computer operating systems from 1951 to the current day. For a narrative explaining the overall developments, see the History of operating systems.
1950s
* 1951
** LEO I 'Lyons Electro ...
References
Further reading
*
External links
Official IBM TPF websiteAirline Control Program/Transaction Processing Facility (ACP /TPF) General Information Manual (1979)
20th-century aviation
Airline Control Program
1968 software
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