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 mainframe computer family.

Development began with SABRE (Semi-Automatic Business Research Environment), Deltamatic, and PANAMAC.

It was shipped on a "mini-reel" which contained a complete ACP system and its libraries for restoration to IBM 3340 disk drives.

A hypervisor was included, which allowed OS/370 VS1 or VS2 (SVS or MVS) to be run as a "guest" OS under ACP itself.

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.