31–40 of 52 posts
"The key insight is [...]. No daemons. No background threads. No connection state persisted in memory between transactions." Closed the tab.
Site is likely SEO slop for future product placement.
Interesting to note right at the start of the article that they sat on a plane next to each other in 1953 but the formal partnership between AA and IBM was not till 1959 - 6 years later! The article makes it look like all this happened magically fast but in reality a reminder that things take time! >> is almost mythological. In 1953, C.R. Smith, president of American Airlines, was seated next to R. Blair Smith, an IB…
The system was a based on a military messaging system.
What is important to note is before SABRE the system used was a sell at will until a stop message was issued. Then sales would be on request. This method is still used between different airline systems today.
Before the implementation of SABRE airlines used teleprinters as a way of communicating. Some of the commands SABRE and other IBM 360 systems come directly from this period. For example AJFkSFO9MAR was a way of economizing on characters sent. It means what is the available seats from JFK to San Francisco on the 9th of March. This predates SABRE.
There is several reasons that the System 360 (the reservation systems used by airlines like SABRE) is one that it is written in Assembler, and also the logic is very tied into its role of reservation. For example it was designed in the days of punchcards, which have a totally different method of matching than a relational Database. The logic is still used on matching a seat to a fare.
On the pure speed much of it is gained by clever engineering tricks. An example would be the passenger record. This is 9 alphanumeric id of the passenger reservation. It is the hash of virtual memory location of the reservation. It takes 4 cpu cycles to retrieve it.
>TPF is not modern. It would fail every architectural review a contemporary engineering team would apply to it. It also handles 50,000 transactions per second with sub-100ms latency on hardware that costs a fraction of an equivalent cloud footprint. It has been doing this for 60 years. What kind of review would it fail? Sounds like it's pretty well designed to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Library code - This is necessary because some things are best done correctly, just once, and then reused. I am not going to write my own date/time handling code. Or crypto. Or image codecs. Run time - This makes development faster. Python, Lua, and Node.js projects can typically test out small changes locally faster than Rust and C++ can recompile. (I say this as a pro Rust user - The link step is so damned slow.) Co…
> Most of it's here for a reason. Your argument for host os, virtual os, container is the very point im making. Rather than solve for security and installablity, we built more tooling, more layers of abstraction. Each have overhead, security surface and complexity. Rather than solve Rusts performance (at build time), switch to a language that is faster but has more overhead, more security surface, more complexity. Yo…
SABRE, is a reminder that things that are well designed just work. How many banks and ERP's, how many accounting systems are still running COBOL scripts? (A lot). Think about modern web infrastructure and how we deploy... cpu -> hypervisor -> vm -> container -> run time -> library code -> your code Do we really need to stack all these turtles (abstractions) just to get instructions to a CPU? Every one of those layers…
Also, try to retrieve a PNR on an airline website or do like anything on the airline's own website -- the UX is usually pretty bad and the data loading takes forever. For that too the GDS is to blame.
Interesting to note right at the start of the article that they sat on a plane next to each other in 1953 but the formal partnership between AA and IBM was not till 1959 - 6 years later! The article makes it look like all this happened magically fast but in reality a reminder that things take time! >> is almost mythological. In 1953, C.R. Smith, president of American Airlines, was seated next to R. Blair Smith, an IB…
So during the intermittent period IBM and American Airlines were focused on research of the problem. The system was a based on a military messaging system. What is important to note is before SABRE the system used was a sell at will until a stop message was issued. Then sales would be on request. This method is still used between different airline systems today. Before the implementation of SABRE airlines used telepr…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Library code - This is necessary because some things are best done correctly, just once, and then reused. I am not going to write my own date/time handling code. Or crypto. Or image codecs. Run time - This makes development faster. Python, Lua, and Node.js projects can typically test out small changes locally faster than Rust and C++ can recompile. (I say this as a pro Rust user - The link step is so damned slow.) Co…
> Most of it's here for a reason. Your argument for host os, virtual os, container is the very point im making. Rather than solve for security and installablity, we built more tooling, more layers of abstraction. Each have overhead, security surface and complexity. Rather than solve Rusts performance (at build time), switch to a language that is faster but has more overhead, more security surface, more complexity. Yo…
---
sabre, the company that owns and builds the current version of the system SABRE used by major companies today, uses all of those things the parent and you mentioned
> Google Cloud-native infrastructure that is scalable and secure. Microservice-enabled architecture that supports modularity. API-first approach for an open platform. [0]
> We rebuilt Sabre from the ground up: cloud-native technology, AI baked into the foundation, one goal in mind. Your success. [1]
yeah ... it's 'ai powered' now.
[0]: https://www.sabre.com/resources/viewpoints/offer-order-strat... (skip to the 'different by design' heading)
[1]: https://www.sabre.com/about/
---
> Do we really need to stack all these turtles (abstractions) just to get instructions to a CPU?
no. but those abstractions are there for things like scaling, reliability, redundancy, flexibility, ... and a bunch of other things not related to solely getting some instructions to a CPU. the number of turtles has increased because customers have more requirements for software today than they used to have in the 1960s.
sometimes we need the simplest solution with fewest dependencies. sometimes we need lots of turtles... it really depends on the problem in front of us.
Interesting to note right at the start of the article that they sat on a plane next to each other in 1953 but the formal partnership between AA and IBM was not till 1959 - 6 years later! The article makes it look like all this happened magically fast but in reality a reminder that things take time! >> is almost mythological. In 1953, C.R. Smith, president of American Airlines, was seated next to R. Blair Smith, an IB…
Three women are sitting in a bar discussing their lovers, the first says, "My lover is a wrestler, he's so energetic, it's _wonderful_!".
The second responds, "My lover is a poet, he's so romantic and thoughtful and sensitive, it's like something out of a fairy tale!".
The third is silent, and the other two women look at her expectantly until she finally sighs and says, "My lover is an IBM salesman, he just sits on the edge of the bed and tells me how good it will be when we eventually make love."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I noticed that too and did roll my eyes as well but I'm glad I kept reading - its actually quite a good article. Maybe the author used an LLM to help do some copy editing but should have probably given it less editorial agency. Either way I'm glad I read it and waiting for the other parts of the series. Really curious how to get access to this airline booking data so I can write my own bot to book my flights and deal…
Same here—I tolerated the linguistic tics, I found enough meat to keep going, but it’s the conclusions that confuse me. And that feels like the intellectually dangerous part with this sort of LLM writing. For example: > Convergent evolution is real. Every major GDS independently arrived at the same underlying platform. That is not coincidence — it is the market discovering the optimal solution to a specific problem.…
[...]
>> One 9-character string, sitting in a PNR field, threading across four organisations' financial systems.
(emphasis added)
It's not that identifiers identify. It's that an identifier identifies the same thing across multiple, independent, entirely distinct systems.
There are other examples: credit card numbers, government issued ID numbers.
But in general, identifiers have little currency outside the system that generated them, hence the "impressed" element to this.