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I did something similar for a customer of ours who was a major UK cinema chain - they had had a falling out with some small company that had built an online boo
by Mauricebranagh 6y ago
I did something similar for a customer of ours who was a major UK cinema chain - they had had a falling out with some small company that had built an online booking system.
Highlights:
1 Bookings where made at individual cinemas
2 The network was a packet radio system that blocked :-) only Transaction could be in flight (Leicester square had two channels)
3 Core of system was Perl running on three windows NT machines which manipulated a shonky screen based system (Pacer Cats)
4 Trying to sell tickets online for Phantom menace system crashed at midnight (when tickets went on sale) we made 1 transaction at 6am
% And no credentials so I had to research how to crack NT - I did consider setting up or fleet of a dozen or so of our suns as a cluster to crack NT, but not sure if the internal security would have liked that (aka secret squirrels and the bit that Bruce Shenier worked for
- Nextgrid 6y agoI'd love to read a detailed write-up about this. Why packet radio - what was the real-time requirement and why couldn't it be fulfilled by an internet connection (I understand internet was primitive back then, but ISDN should've been able to give you enough bandwidth?).
- Mauricebranagh 6y agoWe never understood why the where using packet radio as you say in 1999 ip via ISDN would have been fine. Its complicated by at the time the total lock on ticket booking systems cinema and theatre by a particular company - who wanted 1/4 mill plus to update the system. It was an interesting project I had to get cover from a v senior manger to investigate how to break into NT.