UA posted this article on their employee website......they clearly have reverted back to the post merger CO tone-deaf attitude if they honestly are celebrating their "position of leadership when it came to technology". The employee comments that went along with the post were priceless notably these:
"That this article completely avoids mentioning the actual history of Shares at United airlines is unfortunate."
"In other news, Abacus was invented over 5000 years ago, so perhaps we should incorporate it into our daily use at work."

Fifty years ago this month, Continental ushered in a new era of technology in the airline industry with the introduction of the SONIC reservation system. Now known as Shares, the application went live at midnight on May 18, 1968, replacing the hand-written passenger manifests and manual booking processes that airlines had relied upon for years, forever changing the way our customers purchase tickets.

Working in partnership with IBM, a dozen employees from multiple departments – most of whom had little to no technical background – formed the team that developed SONIC. Learning to code on the fly, they spent more than two years building the system to meet front-line specifications. Among that group was Ralph Boester, who in 1965 was handpicked from Continental’s ORD operation to work on the project.

“Continental had the foresight at that time to become the first carrier to sign up [with IBM] for the system, and there was a clause in the contract that said no other airline could cut over before Continental did,” Ralph recalled. “Because of that, we had a significant role in defining what the product would become.”

One of the first-of-its-kind functionalities they created was an advance seat assignment option. Management also pushed for SONIC to have connectivity with early desktop computer terminals, meaning agents working at airport counters and in reservations could quickly and easily access information from the mainframe.

In 1970, Continental used SONIC as a template to build Shares, the reservation system we still use today. Last week, six of the former employees who were part of the SONIC project, Ralph included, met for dinner in Los Angeles to commemorate the anniversary, celebrating the fact that, with enhancements added over the years, their creation is still in use half-a-century later, processing somewhere in the range of 300,000 – 400,000 passenger bookings each day.

While it was a critical milestone for our airline, it was hardly the last time we found ourselves in a position of leadership when it came to technology. In recent years, we were the first to offer mobile check in and mobile boarding passes on our app, the first U.S. carrier to offer satellite Wi-Fi on international flights and the first to equip our front-line employees with an “in-the-moment care” app with which to better serve our customers while on the move.

“We’re always looking for ways in which technology can make things easier for our customers,” Commercial Technology VP Ravi Simhambhatla said. “We’re putting more capabilities into the palms of their hands with mobile app enhancements, creating personalized and contextually aware digital experiences and making inflight Wi-Fi more reliable. The commercial aviation industry has been a driver of technological innovation over decades, and it is indeed gratifying to find ourselves continuing to build new innovative technologies to help our customers connect to the world.”