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Business Computers in ‘‘Real Time’’
Although early tabulation technologies played a significant role in the collection and dissemination of demographic data by government departments working in conjunction with the U.S. Census Bureau, the networking of demographic databases within the spheres of production and inventory initially had to overcome the limitations of timeliness. As Norbert Wiener, James Carey, Harold Innis, and Armand Mattelart have all reminded us with the examples of the telegraph and the railway, new information technologies and techniques are often first applied to systems of transportation. The emergence of real-time computer technologies is in this regard no different. During the 1930s, American Airlines operated a centralized reservation system, dubbed the ‘‘Request and Reply’’ system, in which sales agents communicated via telephone with a centralized inventory control. This exceedingly slow process required a request for seating from a sales agent, a reply from inventory control, and finally a communication to the customer (Copeland, Mason & McKinney 1995). In response to the increasing numbers of Americans traveling by air after World War II, American Airlines installed the ‘‘Reservisor,’’ a semiautomated reservation system, in its Boston office in 1946. Similar to Herman Hollerith’s punch-card tabulating machine, the Reservisor operated through ‘‘a matrix of relays into which relays were manually inserted to indicate ‘open’ or ‘closed.’ . . . The columns of the matrix represented dates and the rows represented flight legs. . . . Checking the continuity between vertical and horizontal lines revealed whether a shorting plug had been inserted, meaning that a flight had been sold-out’’ (Copeland, Mason & McKinney 1995, 32–33).
An updated ‘‘Magnetronic Reservisor’’ system, fully installed in New York’s LaGuardia Airport by 1952, further streamlined the process of scheduling and reservations. With the emergence of large Boeing 707 series of jetliners in the late 1950s, American Airlines worked closely with IBM executives and systems designers to customize a computer system for a much larger traveling public. Between 1960 and 1962, drawing on air defense systems previously built by IBM for the U.S. military, American and IBM programmers had built the Sabre automated airline reservation system and ushered in the era of computing in real time. By 1965, the Sabre system was fully online and had proven its capabilities in tracking complex schedules in real time for a number of other carriers, such as Delta Air Lines and Pan American World Airways (Copeland, Mason & McKinney 1995, 40).Before such real-time tracking and inventory applications could be expanded into other areas of business and government, though, computer technology would have to address problems in data storage and cross-platform and -computer compatibility. While one could rightly conceive the punch card as among the first storage devices, the increased capacities of tape drive systems in the 1960s (including half-inch tape in IBM’s System/360 and hyper- tape in IBM’s 7340), advanced disk files, and removable disk packs (the size of phonograph records) made large amounts of data easily transported, stored, and diagnosed by compatible computers elsewhere (Pugh, Johnson & Palmer 1991). The innovation of such flexible storage and retrieval systems is largely attributed to John von Neumann and his colleagues at the Institute for Advanced Study’s Computer Project at Princeton University from the years 1945 to 1947 (Richtmyer 1965).
Besides researching the arithmetic-grounded basis for machine language, the Institute for Advanced Study focused on the logic of storage units and memory. The Institute’s applicability to contemporary computing and database systems lies in its discussion of assembler and compiler technologies. According to Richtmyer (1965), assembler and compilers formed the backbone of most coding mechanisms in the 1960s. He argues that ‘‘In [such] systems, the code is written, usually in somewhat symbolic form, in pieces, each of which ignores the other pieces; the assembler or compiler then puts the pieces together, assigns storage locations, and computes and inserts the relative addresses and the addresses of cross references between the pieces.’’ Unlike the punch card or tape drive, which was inserted into the ‘‘tabulating machine,’’ the accumulated data were located in the same device as the computer system data, which made possible the continuous and ongoing modification of programs during their actual operations, a logic that was later materialized in the hard drive of the personal computer (Richtmyer 1965, 10).By 1952, increasingly powerful, automated, and affordable computer applications and information-tracking systems were entering the corporate and manufacturing business sectors. James W. Cortada (1996), for example, cites General Electric’s installation of a digital computer in its Lexington, Kentucky, appliance factory as the first use of information technology in industrial production. Such an application, however, was quite unlike American Airline’s reservation system in that it concentrated (initially, at least) on relatively simple accounting and inventory applications and (in the 1960s) on manufacturing resource-management applications. The ability to rationalize supply- and demand-based systems in a production, marketing, and consumption loop was not widely realized until both commodities and consumers were encoded with unique forms of identification—bar codes.
