6 ms·

Sabre (computer system)

65 points by godelmachine 8y ago

bearjaws 8y ago
Having worked for a major booking website several years ago, Sabre was a nightmare to work with. It felt more like I was in a beta program to integrate with them rather than a production system.
- camflan 8y ago
  can confirm. Though the other gds aren't _that_ much better
  - godelmachine 8y ago
    May I ask what does "gds" mean?
    - bena 8y ago
      From the wikipedia link, it seems "Global Distribution System".
      - godelmachine 8y ago
        Yes, that seems be correct! Also, its different from "computer reservations system". Easy to get confused between the two terminologies.
        eldavido 8y ago
        CRS is an old term from when it was possible to take reservations without a computer. It can also mean "central reservation system", in the sense of "we operate above the level of a single property, aggregating all supply for an entire chain/brand". GDS was the system travel agents use to access supply (lodging) that's been aggregated all in once place. Its importance has fallen as fewer people are using travel agencies, and OTAs (online travel agencies -- Expedia, booking.com) have created separate pools of supply. I work in this area. If you need any help, questions, consulting, etc., email is in profile.
        godelmachine 8y ago
        Thanks for coming back :) I will surely ask you questions once I have one in my mind.
  - bena 8y ago
    Do you think this might be a function of the same thing the electronic medical record (EMR) field faces? For reference, I used to work in the EMR space for a "value-added reseller" of a certain EMR package. It wasn't great. But when you looked at the other options, they weren't great either. Eventually I learned that medical software is a ghetto because those who care about the medical part of it don't really care about the software part of it. At least not enough to treat it as the craft it is. And those who care about the software development tend to leave because you can do better work elsewhere. So do you think GDS products suffer because no one cares about actually developing software, but rather the end goal?
    - PurpleRamen 8y ago
      GDS suck because of compability. Compability to decade old systems and workers, and compability to evertything and anything. The first GDS where 40-50 years ago created, under the stress of very limited resources, aimed for very specific handling. In that time, workflows and concepts were established and brought into productions, which are still used today. If you think unix-commandline is cryptic in it's usage, then you should try gds-commands, which are often optimized to the single characters. Today you can use XML and JSON, but they are only build on top of those old systems, leading to many old crafty things.
- cmrberry 8y ago
  Agreed. I did operations mgmt for a travel agency for two years. Maintaining their Sabre system was the worst part of my job.
PurpleRamen 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeus_IT_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeus_IT_Group The other big reservation provider.
- abhiminator 8y ago
  Sabre's market share is relatively strong in the United States and North America in general, but it loses out to Amadeus's CRS [0] everywhere else. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeus_CRS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeus_CRS
badatusernames 8y ago
Sayber or Sawbre https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoT-6Z597Tc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoT-6Z597Tc
- Humdeee 8y ago
  I have no clue why the Sabre Pyramid never took off. It's an ergonomic and engineering marvel, touted as 'Your portable connection to everything in space and time.' http://theoffice.wikia.com/wiki/Pyramid http://theoffice.wikia.com/wiki/Pyramid
- jacobush 8y ago
  A working bespoke IBM product! They don't make'm like they used to.
m23khan 8y ago
One of my friends told me it is a Mainframe-based application. That is pretty cool.
- bena 8y ago
  Not too surprising. It's probably been chugging along for decades. There's a lot of old code running the world.
- scrumper 8y ago
  It's a direct descendant, really almost a twin, of the SAGE air defense system from the 1950s. This was one of, if not the, first large-scale networked computer system. https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/sage/breakthroughs/ https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/sage/b...
  - kens 8y ago
    Although SABRE uses ideas (like networking) from SAGE, the two systems are entirely different. SAGE used the AN/FSQ-7, a monstrous vacuum tube system. SABRE used transistorized IBM 7090 mainframes, a descendant of the 709 mainframe. You can see parts of the SAGE system at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. An interesting feature of the displays is a "light gun", used by the weapons director to select targets. Also of interest is the cigarette lighter and ashtray built right into the console.
    - derefr 8y ago
      > light gun The same technology in light pens and the NES Super Scope, involving a sensor in the gun and a sync-pulse on the display? Or was this an actual example of a CRT being used as a dual-mode transducer, both producing light and observing “unexpected” light above-and-beyond that produced?
      - kens 8y ago
        The light gun had a sensor. When it was pointed at something on the display, it would trigger at the time the item was redrawn, indicating to the system which item was detected. Details: http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/CasteelSageRecollections.html#LightGun http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/CasteelSageRecollections.html...
posting2fast 8y ago
> Congress investigated these practices and in 1983 Bob Crandall, president of American, was the most vocal supporter of the systems. "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," he told them http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html > Google is designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently and produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems. The prototype with a full text and hyperlink database of at least 24 million pages is available at http://google.stanford.edu/ http://google.stanford.edu/ [..] > Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. > Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm. -- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" From that (lip service) to the ElsaGate autoplay fiasco in under 2 decades, and of course using public resources to get the foot in the door. Par of the course.
dchuk 8y ago
My sister in law is a travel agent and has to use this. It looks god awful, but she is quite efficient in it. Similar to finding companies still using AS400 systems...not modern in the slightest, but efficient for skilled users.
- PeCaN 8y ago
  In some ways AS/400 is still more modern than most systems. Flat, persistent address space and capability security? I'm still hoping that the ideas in AS/400 will become mainstream.
  - jaak 8y ago
    Our main customer has a global network of AS/400 systems. The employees make fun of the "old" looking text interface, but that system is pretty much bullet proof. The only times I ever see it go down are when their Windows based DNS servers crash.
fakenewsisreal 8y ago
Yeah and these GDS systems are also strikingly insecure https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7964-where_in_the_world_is_carmen_sandiego https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7964-where_in_the_world_is_carme...
cyberferret 8y ago
Ah. memories. My first business back in the early 90's was a small local IT company called Sabre Systems. On a weekly basis, we would get calls from travel agents all over the world asking for technical support for their online reservation system which I didn't even know existed until we started getting those calls!
matdrewin 8y ago
The book “Hard Landing: The Epic Contest for Power and Profits That Plunged the Airlines into Chaos” provides a good overview of how these airline reservation systems came to be.
cmsonger 8y ago
And here I thought maybe you were linking to this ... http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/interactive_c/saberc/saberc http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/interactive_c/s... ... which was amazing in the day.

65 points by godelmachine 8y ago

Having worked for a major booking website several years ago, Sabre was a nightmare to work with. It felt more like I was in a beta program to integrate with them rather than a production system.

camflan 8y ago
can confirm. Though the other gds aren't _that_ much better
- godelmachine 8y ago
  May I ask what does "gds" mean?
  - bena 8y ago
    From the wikipedia link, it seems "Global Distribution System".
    - godelmachine 8y ago
      Yes, that seems be correct! Also, its different from "computer reservations system". Easy to get confused between the two terminologies.
      - eldavido 8y ago
        CRS is an old term from when it was possible to take reservations without a computer. It can also mean "central reservation system", in the sense of "we operate above the level of a single property, aggregating all supply for an entire chain/brand". GDS was the system travel agents use to access supply (lodging) that's been aggregated all in once place. Its importance has fallen as fewer people are using travel agencies, and OTAs (online travel agencies -- Expedia, booking.com) have created separate pools of supply. I work in this area. If you need any help, questions, consulting, etc., email is in profile.
        godelmachine 8y ago
        Thanks for coming back :) I will surely ask you questions once I have one in my mind.
- bena 8y ago
  Do you think this might be a function of the same thing the electronic medical record (EMR) field faces? For reference, I used to work in the EMR space for a "value-added reseller" of a certain EMR package. It wasn't great. But when you looked at the other options, they weren't great either. Eventually I learned that medical software is a ghetto because those who care about the medical part of it don't really care about the software part of it. At least not enough to treat it as the craft it is. And those who care about the software development tend to leave because you can do better work elsewhere. So do you think GDS products suffer because no one cares about actually developing software, but rather the end goal?
  - PurpleRamen 8y ago
    GDS suck because of compability. Compability to decade old systems and workers, and compability to evertything and anything. The first GDS where 40-50 years ago created, under the stress of very limited resources, aimed for very specific handling. In that time, workflows and concepts were established and brought into productions, which are still used today. If you think unix-commandline is cryptic in it's usage, then you should try gds-commands, which are often optimized to the single characters. Today you can use XML and JSON, but they are only build on top of those old systems, leading to many old crafty things.
cmrberry 8y ago
Agreed. I did operations mgmt for a travel agency for two years. Maintaining their Sabre system was the worst part of my job.

PurpleRamen 8y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeus_IT_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeus_IT_Group The other big reservation provider.

abhiminator 8y ago
Sabre's market share is relatively strong in the United States and North America in general, but it loses out to Amadeus's CRS [0] everywhere else. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeus_CRS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeus_CRS

badatusernames 8y ago

Sayber or Sawbre https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoT-6Z597Tc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoT-6Z597Tc

Humdeee 8y ago
I have no clue why the Sabre Pyramid never took off. It's an ergonomic and engineering marvel, touted as 'Your portable connection to everything in space and time.' http://theoffice.wikia.com/wiki/Pyramid http://theoffice.wikia.com/wiki/Pyramid
jacobush 8y ago
A working bespoke IBM product! They don't make'm like they used to.

m23khan 8y ago

One of my friends told me it is a Mainframe-based application. That is pretty cool.

bena 8y ago
Not too surprising. It's probably been chugging along for decades. There's a lot of old code running the world.
scrumper 8y ago
It's a direct descendant, really almost a twin, of the SAGE air defense system from the 1950s. This was one of, if not the, first large-scale networked computer system. https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/sage/breakthroughs/ https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/sage/b...
- kens 8y ago
  Although SABRE uses ideas (like networking) from SAGE, the two systems are entirely different. SAGE used the AN/FSQ-7, a monstrous vacuum tube system. SABRE used transistorized IBM 7090 mainframes, a descendant of the 709 mainframe. You can see parts of the SAGE system at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. An interesting feature of the displays is a "light gun", used by the weapons director to select targets. Also of interest is the cigarette lighter and ashtray built right into the console.
  - derefr 8y ago
    > light gun The same technology in light pens and the NES Super Scope, involving a sensor in the gun and a sync-pulse on the display? Or was this an actual example of a CRT being used as a dual-mode transducer, both producing light and observing “unexpected” light above-and-beyond that produced?
    - kens 8y ago
      The light gun had a sensor. When it was pointed at something on the display, it would trigger at the time the item was redrawn, indicating to the system which item was detected. Details: http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/CasteelSageRecollections.html#LightGun http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/CasteelSageRecollections.html...

posting2fast 8y ago

> Congress investigated these practices and in 1983 Bob Crandall, president of American, was the most vocal supporter of the systems. "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," he told them http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html > Google is designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently and produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems. The prototype with a full text and hyperlink database of at least 24 million pages is available at http://google.stanford.edu/ http://google.stanford.edu/ [..] > Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. > Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm. -- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" From that (lip service) to the ElsaGate autoplay fiasco in under 2 decades, and of course using public resources to get the foot in the door. Par of the course.

dchuk 8y ago

My sister in law is a travel agent and has to use this. It looks god awful, but she is quite efficient in it. Similar to finding companies still using AS400 systems...not modern in the slightest, but efficient for skilled users.

PeCaN 8y ago
In some ways AS/400 is still more modern than most systems. Flat, persistent address space and capability security? I'm still hoping that the ideas in AS/400 will become mainstream.
- jaak 8y ago
  Our main customer has a global network of AS/400 systems. The employees make fun of the "old" looking text interface, but that system is pretty much bullet proof. The only times I ever see it go down are when their Windows based DNS servers crash.

fakenewsisreal 8y ago

Yeah and these GDS systems are also strikingly insecure https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7964-where_in_the_world_is_carmen_sandiego https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7964-where_in_the_world_is_carme...

cyberferret 8y ago

Ah. memories. My first business back in the early 90's was a small local IT company called Sabre Systems. On a weekly basis, we would get calls from travel agents all over the world asking for technical support for their online reservation system which I didn't even know existed until we started getting those calls!

matdrewin 8y ago

The book “Hard Landing: The Epic Contest for Power and Profits That Plunged the Airlines into Chaos” provides a good overview of how these airline reservation systems came to be.

cmsonger 8y ago

And here I thought maybe you were linking to this ... http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/interactive_c/saberc/saberc http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/interactive_c/s... ... which was amazing in the day.