
Sabre (computer system) - godelmachine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(computer_system)
======
bearjaws
Having worked for a major booking website several years ago, Sabre was a
nightmare to work with. It felt more like I was in a beta program to integrate
with them rather than a production system.

~~~
camflan
can confirm. Though the other gds aren't _that_ much better

~~~
bena
Do you think this might be a function of the same thing the electronic medical
record (EMR) field faces?

For reference, I used to work in the EMR space for a "value-added reseller" of
a certain EMR package. It wasn't great. But when you looked at the other
options, they weren't great either.

Eventually I learned that medical software is a ghetto because those who care
about the medical part of it don't _really_ care about the software part of
it. At least not enough to treat it as the craft it is. And those who care
about the software development tend to leave because you can do better work
elsewhere.

So do you think GDS products suffer because no one cares about actually
developing software, but rather the end goal?

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PurpleRamen
GDS suck because of compability. Compability to decade old systems and
workers, and compability to evertything and anything. The first GDS where
40-50 years ago created, under the stress of very limited resources, aimed for
very specific handling. In that time, workflows and concepts were established
and brought into productions, which are still used today.

If you think unix-commandline is cryptic in it's usage, then you should try
gds-commands, which are often optimized to the single characters. Today you
can use XML and JSON, but they are only build on top of those old systems,
leading to many old crafty things.

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badatusernames
Sayber or Sawbre
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoT-6Z597Tc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoT-6Z597Tc)

~~~
Humdeee
I have no clue why the Sabre Pyramid never took off. It's an ergonomic and
engineering marvel, touted as 'Your portable connection to everything in space
and time.'

[http://theoffice.wikia.com/wiki/Pyramid](http://theoffice.wikia.com/wiki/Pyramid)

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cyberferret
Ah. memories. My first business back in the early 90's was a small local IT
company called Sabre Systems. On a weekly basis, we would get calls from
travel agents all over the world asking for technical support for their online
reservation system which I didn't even know existed until we started getting
those calls!

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PurpleRamen
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeus_IT_Group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeus_IT_Group)

The other big reservation provider.

~~~
abhiminator
Sabre's market share is relatively strong in the United States and North
America in general, but it loses out to Amadeus's CRS [0] everywhere else.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeus_CRS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeus_CRS)

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cmsonger
And here I thought maybe you were linking to this ...

[http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/interactive_c/s...](http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/interactive_c/saberc/saberc)

... which was amazing in the day.

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fakenewsisreal
Yeah and these GDS systems are also strikingly insecure
[https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7964-where_in_the_world_is_carme...](https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7964-where_in_the_world_is_carmen_sandiego)

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dchuk
My sister in law is a travel agent and has to use this. It looks god awful,
but she is quite efficient in it. Similar to finding companies still using
AS400 systems...not modern in the slightest, but efficient for skilled users.

~~~
PeCaN
In some ways AS/400 is still more modern than most systems. Flat, persistent
address space and capability security? I'm still hoping that the ideas in
AS/400 will become mainstream.

~~~
jaak
Our main customer has a global network of AS/400 systems. The employees make
fun of the "old" looking text interface, but that system is pretty much bullet
proof. The only times I ever see it go down are when their Windows based DNS
servers crash.

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m23khan
One of my friends told me it is a Mainframe-based application. That is pretty
cool.

~~~
scrumper
It's a direct descendant, really almost a twin, of the SAGE air defense system
from the 1950s. This was one of, if not the, first large-scale networked
computer system.

[https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/sage/b...](https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/sage/breakthroughs/)

~~~
kens
Although SABRE uses ideas (like networking) from SAGE, the two systems are
entirely different. SAGE used the AN/FSQ-7, a monstrous vacuum tube system.
SABRE used transistorized IBM 7090 mainframes, a descendant of the 709
mainframe.

You can see parts of the SAGE system at the Computer History Museum in
Mountain View. An interesting feature of the displays is a "light gun", used
by the weapons director to select targets. Also of interest is the cigarette
lighter and ashtray built right into the console.

~~~
derefr
> light gun

The same technology in light pens and the NES Super Scope, involving a sensor
in the gun and a sync-pulse on the display? Or was this an actual example of a
CRT being used as a dual-mode transducer, both producing light and observing
“unexpected” light above-and-beyond that produced?

~~~
kens
The light gun had a sensor. When it was pointed at something on the display,
it would trigger at the time the item was redrawn, indicating to the system
which item was detected. Details: [http://ed-thelen.org/comp-
hist/CasteelSageRecollections.html...](http://ed-thelen.org/comp-
hist/CasteelSageRecollections.html#LightGun)

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matdrewin
The book “Hard Landing: The Epic Contest for Power and Profits That Plunged
the Airlines into Chaos” provides a good overview of how these airline
reservation systems came to be.

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posting2fast
> Congress investigated these practices and in 1983 Bob Crandall, president of
> American, was the most vocal supporter of the systems. "The preferential
> display of our flights, and the corresponding increase in our market share,
> is the competitive _raison d 'être_ for having created the system in the
> first place," he told them

[http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html](http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html)

> Google is designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently and produce much
> more satisfying search results than existing systems. The prototype with a
> full text and hyperlink database of at least 24 million pages is available
> at [http://google.stanford.edu/](http://google.stanford.edu/)

[..]

> Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is
> advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always
> correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our
> prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The
> Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains
> in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a
> cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its
> high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of
> citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine
> which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty
> justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For
> this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian
> 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently
> biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

> Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines,
> search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText,
> which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top
> of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of
> bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who
> "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This
> business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable
> search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the
> market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search
> results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from
> competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still
> have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income
> often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For
> example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's
> homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that
> the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its
> name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly
> resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine.
> In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the
> better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the
> consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising
> supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will
> always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or
> have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of
> advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a
> competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

\-- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual
Web Search Engine"

From that (lip service) to the ElsaGate autoplay fiasco in under 2 decades,
and of course using public resources to get the foot in the door. Par of the
course.

