TPF
NASA Terrestrial Planet Finder project
An IBM real-time Operating System for System 390 and other mainframes in the System/360 family. The name is an acronym for Transaction Processing Facility.
TPF evolved from the Airline Control Program (ACP), a free package developed in the mid-1960s by IBM in association with major North American and European Airlines. In 1979, TPF was introduced by IBM to substitute ACP, as a priced software product (ACP was renamed "TPF" to suggests its greater scope).
TPF is designed for fast, high-volume, high-throughput transaction processing, handling large, continuous loads of essentially simple transactions across large, geographically dispersed networks. The world's largest TPF-based systems, running on multiple IBM mainframes, are capable of processing tens of thousands of transactions per second. Current users include British Airways (reservations), VISA International (authorisations), Holiday Inn and Qantas.
TPF is also designed for highly reliable continuous (24 x 7 x 365) operation.
TPF implements an API known as the PARS API, on which many Airline and Financial systems are based.
TPF was traditionally a 370/Assembler environment although the latest, release 4.1, contains C. There was a language called SabreTalk which was born and died on TPF.
It is common for TPF sites to use IBM's MVS and VM operating systems for off-line processing.
(More details?). See also ALCS.
