In the deal, which could be the largest to date for JavaStation, Sabre Group will resell Sun's JavaStation to its 40 airline and 75,000 plus travel agent customers.

The JavaStation will be recommended by Sabre as the preferred system to run Sabre's Qik-Access programme, a real-time system that connects with multiple reservation systems around the world.

"This sounds like the perfect application for the network computer," said Martin Reynolds, an analyst at Gartner Group's Dataquest Inc, a market research firm in San Jose, California. "That makes absolute sense because Sabre runs on mainframes."

Although Sun formally launched its JavaStation with much fanfare at a New York press conference in October, 1996, it has only recently been shipping JavaStations in volume.

Network computers,which were once touted as low-cost devices to replace personal computers in accessing a corporate network or the Internet, have since made more inroads as replacements for dumb terminals that access mainframes or other host computer applications.

Sun said that it has over 250 pilot projects around the world, with the number of users varying from as little as five to its biggest installation to date, at the Roads and Traffic Authority of Australia, which has 900 JavaStations installed.

"This is potentially the biggest deal," said a spokeswoman for the Palo Alto, California-based Sun.

Sabre will also resell other Sun equipment and software. Sabre is rewriting its Qik-Access family to meet Sun's specifications for its Java programming language, which lets an application run on many different computing systems.

Sabre, which started out as the American Airlines reservation system, was spun off in an initial public offering from AMR Corp in 1996. It is based in Fort Worth, Texas and AMR owns 82 per cent ofthe stock.