IBM Airline Control Program

IBM Airline Control Program, or ACP, was the 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 mainframe computer family. This departed from the earlier model in which each airline would have a different, machine-specific transaction system.

Development began with "SABRE (Semi-Automatic Business Research Environment)", "Deltamatic", and "PANAMAC". From these "Programmed Airline Reservation System (PARS)" was developed. In 1968 the control program, "ACP" was separated from PARS; PARS keeping the functions for processing airline reservations and related data.

In February 1979, ACP became known as ACP/TPF and then just TPF (Transaction Processing Facility) as 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.

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

*cite journal
last = Siwiec
first = J.E.
title = A high-performance DB/DC system
journal = IBM J. Research & Development
volume = 1977
issue = 2
url = http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/162/ibmsj1602H.pdf

External links

* [http://www-306.ibm.com/software/htp/tpf/ Official IBM TPF website]
* [http://www.tpfminds.org TPF Minds] (TPF Professionals Forum)
* [http://www.blackbeard.com/tpf/tpfhist.htm The Alternative TPF Homepage]

Notes