User:Travellerva

The Univac Buffer Processor (BP) was used in several real-time system installations in the 1960s as a network concentrator and front end system to the Univac 418 and Univac 490/494 realtime systems. A notable set of installations was at British European Airways in London (the BEACON Online Reservations system). The initial reservations system at B.E.A. comprised over 200 agent sets in London, connected to the Univac 490 computer system via a network of 8 Univac Buffer Processors. Subsequently, in 1966, the reservations network was expanded to include agents in offices in Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow,, Bristol and Edinburgh ad later to B.E.A. offices in selected cities on the European continent. The expansion of the network was accomplished by cascading the installation of Buffer Processors such that remote offices would have a BP installation in the offices, networked into the BP concentrators at the London central site.

The Buffer Processor's internal structure comprised 32,768 "words" of 9 bits each.