Boy oh boy, those're the good old days for sure - remember People's Express @ EWR in the 80's, $29 OW shuttle to DCA/EWR.

Mid 1980's - I had a GEnie (anyone else remember them or had an account - AOL wasn't even born then or at least hasn't risen to the top dog position) account and also CIS (that's CompuServe) account, which I use to access Eaasy Sabre mainly for flight availablities & booking, also did some HZ booking with it (getting old these days, just a faint recollection - actually found one of those text-based 80 characters wide dot-matrix printout off the pc for one of the trip in 1989.)

Back in those days, it was a monochrome 14" CRT, mouse wasn't needed for flight booking as it was menu-based, a dot-matrix printer parallel linked to an original AT&T 286/XT, maybe 16MB ram, dual floppies (5.25" remember) with a 9,600 Hayes modem. Kept my CIS account (from 87 on, I think) for years after moving back to N.Y. but dropped the GEnie account, which eventually went out of business - probably still have a few CompuServe color magazines down in the basement shop area.

The internet was still emerging & slowly making its way to the masses, but yes, ES was a powerful tool for travelers then. Numerous RT & OW tickets booked with it.

I vaguely recalled using OAG's online edition too around that time but it was still preferable then to carry the pocket OAG guide on trips .... oh, dear lord, so much has changed in the last 25 years (or 30 years if I count the pre-IBM PC days with the Wangwriter WP system running CP/M OS on the huge 8" disk.)

Hmmm .... nowadays, all one need is an iPhone or an Android device or perhaps a netbook, and the rest, as they say, is .... history.


Edit: P.S. - AA number issued then via CIS/ES starting with Mxxxxxx still good today (joined Oct. 1, 1998) although we mostly use the OneWorld #