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 daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

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 whic ...

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 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 A sabre ( French: �sabʁ 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 the ...

(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, Transacti ...

(PARS)'' was developed. In 1969 the control program, ''ACP'', was separated from PARS. PARS kept the functions for processing

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 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 fo ...

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.

References

External links

Official IBM TPF website

Airline Control Program/Transaction Processing Facility (ACP /TPF) General Information Manual (1979)
20th-century aviation Airline Control Program 1968 software {{mainframe-compu-stub

Overview

See also

References

Further reading

External links