this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
844 points (98.2% liked)
Technology
59581 readers
4387 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Isn't pretty much all airport scheduling based off software from the 80s or something?
Edit: Found a video about it.
Probably! APOLLO and SABRE and stuff look ancient.
Why change what isn't broken, right?
I've worked in that area. It was broken back in the 90s and I doubt the crusty old parts of the system have gotten any better. I was tasked with writing a more modern wrapper for part of the legacy system, and when I asked for documentation I was told they had literally nothing to give me.
I was just an intern at the time so maybe someone with more clout could have gotten sometime to dig in a forgotten closet for old technical docs, but it still strikes me as a very bad sign when technical docs for a system every agent uses all day every day aren't immediately available on the company's intranet.
That's the thing though, it is.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
it is.
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Oof.
I know for sure several airports are using OpenVMS, and there are more we don't know about, as some companies keep running yheir stuff for decades not asking anyone for support.
And I'm sure There are multiple other old systems out there, it's too hard to replace them.
And they work! Our VMS stuff runs great, it's fast, and the uptime is measured in decades sometimes. So the problem is hardware: we rolled out the first production x86 version this year, so our users are fine (it's still an issue of porting your software, but it's not as terrible as building everything from scratch), but before that OpenVMS could run on Itanium servers at latest, and the platform was dying off since the beginning of 2000s, so it is a problem to find a normal replacement machine now.