TAA Res Board Franklin St
SOPPS, That's really testing my grey matter now, but IF I remeb.mber correctly the board was read left to right for dates of travel and down for timings/flt nos/dest.
That days details on the very left hand columns followed by tomorrows on the right etc until it went to periods of (I think) weekly and onwards.
Each flight segment had a coloured system (of which I can't remember exactly) on the basis of if that flight segment was available to sell immediately on the phone it was say GREEN or you had to take a request and then check it was say YELLOW and if flight was full it was say RED. There were many other variations such as circles, obliques, squares etc which gave further details that you had to take into account. Whilst taking a telephone call, you wrote all the details down on a card and that was sent along a belt to an operator who punch typed over what you had written. If you could only request a seat the confirmation (or otherwise) would be advised back to you fairly quickly. You couldn't cheat by trying to sell a seat on a segment that had none available as whoever controlled the system knew exactly when the board was changed and therefore based on when they received the puched card they knew if you were trying to pull a fast one.
I'll see if I can work out how to post a couple of pictures of the board and you'll see just how massive it was. Paul