Companies that never met, doing business on the record.

Bristol Siddeley stopped selling business-jet engines with spares priced separately and offered a complete engine and accessory replacement service at a fixed cost per flying hour: the operator paid only when engines flew. Rolls-Royce bought the company in 1966, trademarked the phrase, and extended the model across its civil fleet as TotalCare, moving the airline's maintenance planning, spares pool, and live engine-health data inside the manufacturer's network.

The 1962 model survives verbatim as the per-flying-hour agreements now standard across the engine industry.

Bank of America owned the only proven revolving-credit card system at the moment banks nationwide needed one. It franchised the workflow: any bank could run BankAmericard for a $25,000 license fee plus a royalty tied to transaction revenues, which put hundreds of banks' card operations on BofA's system. When fraud and interchange fights threatened collapse, the licensee banks reorganized the network in 1970 into a member-owned corporation, renamed Visa in 1976. The network survived by becoming owned by its users.

Bank of America gave up ownership in 1970 and kept a member's seat. Governance designed early is what let the rest of the industry come aboard.

Hospital purchasing agents ordered directly into the distributor's system, first by punch card and touch-tone, then terminals, wired to each hospital's own stock numbers. Faster ordering, fewer errors, and less inventory made one-vendor consolidation rational, and each terminal generation deepened the embed. A commodity distribution business became a switching-cost business.

Currencies had just started floating and there was no trading floor for FX. Reuters, a news agency that had paid no dividend in forty years, put screens on bank dealing desks and got banks to contribute their own buy and sell rates: banks paid Reuters to publish their prices, and other banks paid to see them. The floating-currency market's venue materialized inside Reuters' network, and from 1981 dealers executed trades on the same screens, so the whole loop of see price, deal, confirm never left the terminal.

The lock was the customers' own contributed record. The banks' prices were the product the banks were buying.

A pharmacist walked the aisles with an order-entry device scanning shelf labels; the order hit McKesson's distribution center and arrived the next day, shelf-sequenced, with price stickers. Layered services made McKesson the store's de facto back office. Once the replenishment loop ran on Economost, switching wholesalers meant re-learning how to run the store, and every competitor had to build the same system or exit.

When United announced its Apollo system would go into travel agencies, American raced subsidized SABRE terminals in first, and the travel agent's whole working day moved onto American's computer. Rival airlines paid per booking to reach their own customers, and American tuned the display so its flights ranked first, until regulators banned display bias in late 1984.

"The preferential display of our flights, and the corresponding increase in our market share, is the competitive raison d'être for having created the system in the first place."

Robert Crandall, defending SABRE in the 1983-84 CAB proceedings

That testimony is what unaudited defaults sound like in the hearing. It is also a preview of the agent era's routing fights.

TCI reached roughly one in five US cable homes, and a channel without TCI carriage effectively did not exist. Malone converted that shelf space into ownership of the programmers who needed it: BET in 1979, the Discovery consortium in 1986, QVC, the 1987 Turner rescue. He structured stakes so founders stayed motivated, then warehoused the portfolio in Liberty Media in 1991.

"He told me he believed I'd work harder for myself than I would for him."

Robert L. Johnson, on why Malone structured most of the money as debt, Fortune, November 2012

A fired Salomon partner built the bond analytics traders lacked, then let an anchor customer finance the network: Merrill Lynch took the first terminals in 1983 and paid $30M for a 30% stake. Data, analytics, and chat stayed in one seat, so leaving the terminal came to mean leaving the conversation where trades actually happen.

FedEx gave free dedicated shipping terminals to any customer sending five or more packages a day. The terminal printed labels, held the address book, ordered pickups, and tracked packages: the customer's shipping desk physically ran on FedEx equipment wired into FedEx's network. The website, a decade later, merely converted an existing terminal estate to the web.

"Information about the package is as important as the package itself."

Fred Smith, FedEx founder, 1979

Walmart inverted the terminal play. Instead of putting its terminal in the supplier's office, it opened its own item-by-store-by-day sales data to suppliers and made them do the forecasting, replenishment, and shelf management on Walmart's system, by Walmart's rules. P&G proved the model with automatic replenishment; Retail Link made it the standard operating condition of selling to Walmart.

DoCoMo refused to make content and built the rails instead: a curated menu on the phone's start screen, per-packet metering, and micro-billing on the subscriber's phone bill, with DoCoMo keeping 9% of content revenue while providers kept 91%. Email, banking, tickets, and ringtones moved into the handset's daily loop, and DoCoMo took a position in every yen and every packet without bearing any content risk.

Amazon forced every internal team to expose data and functionality through hardened service interfaces, then rented the result to anyone: S3 at $0.15 per gigabyte-month, EC2 at $0.10 an hour, priced so a startup's default first act was to build on Amazon. Once code, data, and operations lived there, gravity did the rest.

Toast put subsidized point-of-sale terminals, handhelds, and kitchen screens into restaurants and made payment processing flow through them. Menu, orders, kitchen, payroll, and loyalty all run on Toast; the business is basis points on every card swipe. The filings say it plainly: the hardware loses money on purpose, because the terminal is an installation expense, not the product.

Kodak built a complete filmless camera in December 1975, inside the company that owned about 90% of US film sales, and kept its customers' photography chained to film, chemistry, and prints instead. The inventor's forecast of fifteen to twenty years to consumer readiness was right, and unused. The workflow migrated anyway, onto systems that taxed Kodak nothing and took everything.

"They were convinced that no one would ever want to look at their pictures on a television set."

Steven Sasson, the camera's inventor, on Kodak's executives, New York Times, 2015

Garmin owned consumer navigation outright and priced it as a $200 to $500 device. Google embedded turn-by-turn navigation free inside Android, because Google monetized the flow of mobile search and local intent, not the capability. The capability owner had no position in the flow to retreat to.

"Wednesday morning, Google notified manufacturers of GPS navigation units that their services would no longer be needed."

Rob Pegoraro, Washington Post, November 2009