Hi! I'm the author of this blog post. This was fun to write: I've taken a bunch of flights in my lifetime, and was always curious what travel agents are doing when they book a flight, or what check-in agents are doing when they "can't find the ticket".
Back in the early 90's, my best friend and I started a software consulting and development company called 'Sabre Systems' here in Australia.<p>We started getting calls at least 2 to 3 times a week from travel agents all over the world asking for support and information. It took us several weeks to cotton on that there was a worldwide booking system called SABRE, and that these agents were looking up the name on very early versions of Google or Yahoo search engines (or even just Yellow Pages) and finding our company!
I've been in a different industry for 8 years now, but previously I was in the travel / airline industry working on backend booking systems: it was surprising at the time to me how much stuff was still done using things like VT320 terminals.<p>Interestingly back in ~2008, Amadeus did actually introduce some new XML web APIs for doing things, but they were so badly designed and slow that we ended up still using console terminal text entering / scraping as it was much faster for performing the same tasks (searching for flights, querying them and booking them).<p>And this terminal text entering / scraping code was pretty complicated as it had to cope with pagination on the terminals, scrolling text fields on the terminals, positioning, etc. Obviously only supported ASCII as well.
Thanks, I enjoyed the read the first time I came across.<p>I really don't want to come across as an annoying person but please do not submit the same content marketing articles over and over again. This is the 5th time you're submitting this.