ReserVec

In 1946 American Airlines decided to tackle this problem through automation, introducing the Reservisor, a simple electromechanical computer based on telephone switching systems.

Newer versions of the Reservisor included magnetic drum systems for storing flight information further into the future.

The ultimate version of the system, the Magnetronic Reservisor, was installed in 1956 and could store data for 2,000 flights a day up to one month into the future.

TCA was aware of the Reservisor, but was unimpressed by its limited capabilities in terms of information it could store, and even more by the failure rate, which was essentially "constant".

Furthermore, the Ferut was vacuum tube based, and thus no more reliable than the Reservisor, TCA's major concern prior to the experiment.Richardson was convinced that the basic concept was sound, and formed a team of him and several engineers from the university's Computation Center, operating under the aegis of Adalia Ltd., a consulting firm set up by Robert Watson-Watt of radar fame when he moved to Montreal at the end of World War II.

The demonstration was a complete success; users could quickly feed in requests and Ferut was able to book, change, query and cancel flights at speeds that made the Reservisor look terribly slow.

Simple load balancing software routed requests across two CPUs, known as Castor and Pollux, the computer as a whole thus becoming Gemini.

An internal TCA contest in late 1960 to name the system as a whole resulted in ReserVec for Reservations Electronically Controlled.

Use of ReserVec reduced the head count at the booking office from 230 to 90, and allowed for the sale of thousands of telephone lines formerly needed to reach the human operators.

The United States market seemed to be entirely wrapped up by IBM and Univac, but there was no comparable system in Europe, where a number of airlines were looking at the U.S. developments with interest.

In the end, the UK system would never be delivered; it was still being developed when Ferranti decided to sell off their entire computer division after years of losses.

The engineering team convinced Canadian management to support the development of a business computer aimed at the low-end of the mainframe market.