> Side note, why were Ticketmaster hiring systems programmers writing such low level code? I grew up in the 90s/00s so missed this era of computing. At some po

> Side note, why were Ticketmaster hiring systems programmers writing such low level code? I grew up in the 90s/00s so missed this era of computing. At some point in the 1970s or 1980s, Ticketmaster made the extremely unusual decision of writing their own operating system for VAX. Even back then, that was a pretty weird decision. And it wasn't Terry's idea, they started doing it before he worked there. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9808995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9808995 And apparently decades later their backend was still stuck on it (is it still stuck on it???), albeit now running under a software emulator instead of physical VAX hardware. Most people on VAX ran either Unix or VMS, both of which offered migration paths to other platforms (Alpha -> Itanium -> x86 for VMS; and there were lots of alternative hardware platforms for Unix). But Ticketmaster's weird decision to write their own OS made that almost impossible.