Dave,
A footnote on Les Earnest's fascinating missive on the origins of acronyms, in particular the acronym SAGE--the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment created to simulate missile attacks on the U.S.
The prime contractor on that early Cold War project was IBM, which was right proud of the technology. It wanted to transfer the technology to the commercial sector, but no one could think of an application nearly so large or challenging as the defense of the U.S. against nuclear attack.
One day a sales rep from the IBM Federal Systems Division was seated on an airplane next to C.R. Smith, the great builder of American Airlines. Smith mentioned that he had a huge storage and calculation problem on his hands: coping with the growth of airline reservations in the postwar era. Bingo: IBM soon has a contract to help American develop the first computer-based airline-reservation system.
The point of the story is this: IBM ported the SAGE acronym to the airline project, calling it Semi-Automatic Business Environment Research, or SABER. The name stuck to the service itself.
In promoting the customer convenience of the new system, American, inspired by the 1960 Buck LeSabre, revered the last two letters, leading to the SABRE System, as it is still known today.
(I covered this story in an airline history I wrote called _Hard Landing,_ Random House, 1995.)
cheers, tom