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 IBM salesman, on a cross-country flight. By the time they landed, the outline of a solution had been sketched. IBM and American Airlines entered a formal development partnership in 1959.
edit: oh and then the actual system didn't actually go live another 5 years later - in 1964. Over a decade after the two of them sat next to each other.
Reminder to myself when my potential customers don't sign the deal 5 minutes after my pitch!
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 with all the permutations and combinations to find the best deal.
"That is not coincidence — it is the market discovering the optimal solution to a specific problem. When you see that pattern in your own domain, pay attention to it."
ITA Software integrated with the mainframe network, and was acquired by Google.
An exec made a public quote that they couldn't have done it if they hadn't used Lisp.
(Today, the programming language landscape is somewhat more powerful. Rust got some metaprogramming features informed by Lisps, for example, and the team might've been able to slog through that.)
> It...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.
It is interesting to think how AI will potentially change the dynamics back to this from general purpose software.
In a world where implementation is free, will we see a return to built for purpose systems like this where we define the inputs and outputs desired and AI builds it from the ground up, completely for purpose?
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 has offshoots to other abstractions, tools and functionality that only adds to the complexity and convolution. Languages like Rust and Go compiling down to an executable are a step, revisiting how we deploy (the container layer) is probably on the table next... The use case for "serverless" is there (and edge compute), but the costs are still backwards because the software hasn't caught up yet.
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 IBM salesman, on a cross-country flight. By the time they landed, the outline of a solution had been sketched. IBM and American Airlines entered a formal development partnership in 1959.
edit: oh and then the actual system didn't actually go live another 5 years later - in 1964. Over a decade after the two of them sat next to each other.
Reminder to myself when my potential customers don't sign the deal 5 minutes after my pitch!
"The key insight is [...]. No daemons. No background threads. No connection state persisted in memory between transactions."
Closed the tab.
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 with all the permutations and combinations to find the best deal.
ironically...
Can you explain why that’s wrong?
It's the LLM-generated-text signature.
ITA Software integrated with the mainframe network, and was acquired by Google.
An exec made a public quote that they couldn't have done it if they hadn't used Lisp.
(Today, the programming language landscape is somewhat more powerful. Rust got some metaprogramming features informed by Lisps, for example, and the team might've been able to slog through that.)
Can you add RSS to your site? I’d love to follow but can’t.
> It...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.
Eat that, Bitcoin.
50,000 transactions a second is a bunch for humans.
It’s nothing for even an ancient CPU - let alone our modern marvels that make a Cray 1 cry.
The key is an extremely well-thought and tested design.
Ah yes a completely centralized system that scales, who would have thought.
(For the pedantic, it's not exactly centralized nor federated since each airline treats their view of the world as absolutely correct)
It is interesting to think how AI will potentially change the dynamics back to this from general purpose software.
In a world where implementation is free, will we see a return to built for purpose systems like this where we define the inputs and outputs desired and AI builds it from the ground up, completely for purpose?
I was thinking the same sans AI. What other industries require low latency high throughput transactions that haven’t been served yet?
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 has offshoots to other abstractions, tools and functionality that only adds to the complexity and convolution. Languages like Rust and Go compiling down to an executable are a step, revisiting how we deploy (the container layer) is probably on the table next... The use case for "serverless" is there (and edge compute), but the costs are still backwards because the software hasn't caught up yet.