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It's a legacy story like none other, in fact. The predecessor/origins of SABRE is IBM's Airline Control Program (ACP). When I worked for IBM years ago I heard

by eplanit 10y ago

It's a legacy story like none other, in fact. The predecessor/origins of SABRE is IBM's Airline Control Program (ACP). When I worked for IBM years ago I heard many stories of how difficult it was to try an modernize to a newer system because of absurd complexity, but just as much because the whole airline industry became so inextricably bound to the legacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Airline_Control_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Airline_Control_Program

hourislate 10y ago
You would be surprised how much has already been migrated away from the old IBM systems (TPF). The big players these days are Lufthansa, Jeppesen, Navitaire, Appolo, Sabre, etc.
- tyingq 10y ago
  Apollo is now Galileo. Galileo, Sabre, HP Shares, and Amadeus (the actual "Big 4" in this space) all still use the TPF operating system on IBM mainframes. They all are offloading functionality piecemeal, to more modern systems. But TPF is still at the core. You mentioned Navitaire. They are not using TPF...they use COBOL on Windows (not kidding). They do have a large list of airline customers, but none with a big fleet. Reportedly, it doesn't scale up well enough to serve a large airline. TPF also lives on in the financial world as well, like at Visa, for example.
madeofpalk 10y ago
I'm currently doing consulting work for That Major Australian Airline and, while I'm rather high up the stack, you do get a sense of the amount of legacy that's built into everything and the monumental effort it would be to migrate all this old stuff to newer infra. I mean, AFAICT there's no database/service to _query_ flights - you have to register a web hook to receive flight data and store it yourself. New projects are cloud-first, and more and more stuff gets migrated or replaced with equivalents which run in whatever cloud provider. But I can't even imagine how the replacements for all these old legacy services would go down.
- pbarnes_1 10y ago
  They used to run on Tandem NonStops with a dual DC setup in Sydney and Newcastle. Those were the days.

by eplanit 10y ago

hourislate 10y ago

You would be surprised how much has already been migrated away from the old IBM systems (TPF). The big players these days are Lufthansa, Jeppesen, Navitaire, Appolo, Sabre, etc.

tyingq 10y ago
Apollo is now Galileo. Galileo, Sabre, HP Shares, and Amadeus (the actual "Big 4" in this space) all still use the TPF operating system on IBM mainframes. They all are offloading functionality piecemeal, to more modern systems. But TPF is still at the core. You mentioned Navitaire. They are not using TPF...they use COBOL on Windows (not kidding). They do have a large list of airline customers, but none with a big fleet. Reportedly, it doesn't scale up well enough to serve a large airline. TPF also lives on in the financial world as well, like at Visa, for example.

madeofpalk 10y ago

I'm currently doing consulting work for That Major Australian Airline and, while I'm rather high up the stack, you do get a sense of the amount of legacy that's built into everything and the monumental effort it would be to migrate all this old stuff to newer infra. I mean, AFAICT there's no database/service to _query_ flights - you have to register a web hook to receive flight data and store it yourself. New projects are cloud-first, and more and more stuff gets migrated or replaced with equivalents which run in whatever cloud provider. But I can't even imagine how the replacements for all these old legacy services would go down.

pbarnes_1 10y ago
They used to run on Tandem NonStops with a dual DC setup in Sydney and Newcastle. Those were the days.