It is interesting to compare the system with SABRE, being deployed at about the same time by American Airlines. SABRE was first started as an experimental effort in 1953, and a formal development contract signed in 1957. The system was first turned on in 1960, and took over booking functions in December 1964. So while the two projects started at the same time, ReserVec was completed almost two years earlier. While the ReserVec cost $4 million, SABRE was ten times that. Equally interesting is that while the SABRE CPU was about ten times faster, ReserVec handled 80-100,000 transactions a day with a maximum two second delay, while SABRE handled only 26,000 with delays of up to three seconds.