Reser Vec - TCA Experiments

TCA Experiments

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". Nor did the Reservisor really change the way the reservations system worked; ticket agents still had to call central booking and talk (typically through an intermediary) to a Reservisor operator to answer queries.

TCA asked one of their communications engineers, Lyman Richardson, to study the booking problem, and he quickly came to the opinion that a computerized solution was the only one worth studying. TCA then entered into an agreement to build a prototype system on the University of Toronto's FERUT computer, a surplus Manchester Mark 1 computer they had received in 1952 when the UK's nuclear weapons laboratories had to abandon it after budget cuts.

The FERUT-based system was demonstrated in 1953 and was a qualified success; while the programmed logic and data storage/retrieval worked well, input/output was a serious bottleneck that seemed to make the system no better than the mechanical Reservisor. 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 himself 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. They became involved with the newly-forming electronics group at Ferranti Canada, who felt they had a solution to the input/output and reliability problems.

Ferranti proposed a new "transactor" (terminal) that used a new punched card system. Booking agents at the ticketing offices marked the cards with pencil, for various checkboxes, then inserted it into the transactor which read the marks and punched those codes onto the edge of the card. Cards would then be collected from any number of operators and fed into a normal card reader, which would read them over telephone lines at "high speed" directly into the central booking computer. The computer itself would be built using transistor-based logic, thereby eliminating downtime due to tube burnout. Such a system had first been proposed in order to improve the reliability of the DATAR system Ferranti had built for the Canadian Navy, and they were convinced of its practicality.

TCA was interested, and provided $75,000 for the construction of six prototype transactors. In 1957 these were attached to FERUT over telephone lines and the experimental booking program run again. 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.