CR Smith, president of American Airlines, and R. Blair Smith, a senior sales representative for IBM, met on an American Airlines flight from Los Angeles to New York in 1953. Their conversation about the travel industry sparked the idea for a data processing system that could create and manage airline seat reservations and instantly make that data available electronically to any agent at any location. Six years later, their ideas became reality.
American Airlines and IBM announced their plans to develop a Semi-Automated Business Research Environment, better known as Sabre . The revolutionary system was the first real-time business application, enabling American Airlines to replace the handwritten passenger reservations system of the 1950s with the automated reservations system for the future.