IBM Airline Control Program, or ACP, is a discontinued
operating system developed by
IBM beginning about 1965. In contrast to previous
airline transaction processing systems, the most notable aspect of ACP is that it was designed to run on most models of the
IBM System/360
The IBM System/360 (S/360) is a family of mainframe computer systems that was announced by IBM on April 7, 1964, and delivered between 1965 and 1978. It was the first family of computers designed to cover both commercial and scientific applica ...
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 (Semi-Automatic Business Research Environment)'', ''Deltamatic'', and ''PANAMAC''. From these, the ''
Programmed Airline Reservations System (PARS)'' was developed. In 1969 the control program, ''ACP'', was separated from PARS. PARS kept the functions for processing
airline reservations and related data.
In December 1979, ACP became known as ACP/TPF and then just
TPF TPF may refer to:
* Tibial plateau fracture
* Theodore Payne Foundation for Wild Flowers and Native Plants
* Transaction Processing Facility, an operating system by IBM
* Terrestrial Planet Finder, a proposed system of telescopes to detect extrasola ...
(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
IBM manufactured magnetic disk storage devices from 1956 to 2003, when it sold its hard disk drive business to Hitachi. Both the hard disk drive (HDD) and floppy disk drive (FDD) were invented by IBM and as such IBM's employees were responsible ...
disk drives. From that complete system one could easily create derivative works. A
hypervisor was included, which allowed OS/370
VS1 VS1 may refer to:
*VS1, a V speed in aviation
*VS1, a grade of Diamond clarity
*OS/VS1
Operating System/Virtual Storage 1, or OS/VS1, is a discontinued IBM mainframe computer operating system designed to be run on IBM System/370 hardware. It was ...
or VS2 (
SVS or
MVS) 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
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
IBM Airline Control Program, or ACP, is a discontinued operating system developed by IBM beginning about 1965. In contrast to previous airline transaction processing systems, the most notable aspect of ACP is that it was designed to run on most m ...
1968 software
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