This is the my grandfather’s story about the one of the first european airline’s electronic reservations systems. The beginning of this story took place in late 50’s, the local spanish airline Aviacion y Comercio (Aviaco, IATA:AO, ICAO:AYC) had two visionary workers Jose Fernandez Monreal (my grandfather) and Rafael de la Torre. They wondered on how to manage the ungovernable manual reservation growth. This is the little story of their achievemt and it is also about the competition between IBM and UNIVAC computer makers. Please take your boarding pass.
Aviaco was a domestic airline, and those days there were real personal realtionships with other airlines favoured with the fact that companies as BEA (British European Airlines, the seed, with BOAC, of British Airlines), Alitalia, Air France, etc. did not see Aviaco as real competitor, Iberia were the competitor in european and transatlantic routes for them, and Aviaco was the only Iberia’s domestic competitor. In those conversations