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What makes it even funnier to me is that American Airlines was one of the founding companies of Orbitz who was trying to lower prices from SABRE, which American Airlines started in 1960!!!

Sabre is still around, operating as "Travelocity" in North America and "Last Minute" in Europe. Travelocity used to be called Eaasy Sabre back when it was on CompuServe, GEnie, and old-skool AOL.

The software they run is Sabre, which was co-founded by American Airlines some decades ago. I have no particular knowledge of which software has undergone rewrites and which hasn't, but if you scan their own timeline, it's not hard to suspect that there are huge piles of ancient code still in there.

Almost every travel agency is either A) connected diretly to SABRE, or B) connected to a database that is connected to SABRE.

SABRE being the company and computer system that handles an insane number of daily travel-related reservations and other similar date/time/person related events for *thousands* of companies (including Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, the airlines, etc). And yep, you guessed it, SABRE is based on mainframes.

... as long as the passenger rate is as low as their earnings, it's fine... but...

if they grow and I assume they want to, you can suck Linux or any other Unix compared to the good old TPF, IBMs Transaction Processing Family, scalable like hell, fast like a rocket and secure as you could hardly imagine. And I've recently saw a nice article about SMTP beeing ported to the TPF as well and POP3 is already their, carrying 250 Mio POP Boxes without being slashdotted all the time.... Tux, you better wach your ass in the Rerservation Systems Area of the Airlines around the globe... at least EDS and their client/whatever Sabre and many others are still using it and they won't stop for now ;) Sure, you can port the Tux to the zSeries of big blue but with that you won't get the realtime OS behaviour which TPF is providing.

The article is talking about front-end software that could do fare shopping. These guys aren't replacing the mainframes that run the airline industry - they're providing a nice interface to use the data managed by the mainframes.

Based on the line claiming that they work with 2Gb of static data this sounds like the original message referred to a prototype. The reservation systems measure their data in Tb, and it's very dynamic.

Looks like /. just ran a nice ad for some folks who are trying to get some work building software for online travel sites.

(Note: The Sabre bomb-proof bunker isn't located in any of the cities listed. I know because I can look out the window and see the top of it. See this.)

Nothing in the article suggests this is changing now, but in the long term? Does this mean Compaq is gradually losing the main NYSE account? Damn! At least Compaq got the whole Sabre account as compensation...

Interesting you should mention this, even as a joke. At one point, AA really were making more profit off SABRE than they were off flying planes around.

...SABRE, the largest airline reservation service in the universe, runs on multiple Sun E10Ks

Uh, no.
Sabre's Travelocity runs on multiple Sun 10,000's. It get's its goodies from the Sabre reservation system which is multiple mainframes connected to several hundred high-end storage devices through lots of DASD controllers.
Having worked in the underground bunker, I can assure you that you can't even comprehend the volume of big iron that's down there. See the website at http://www.sabre.com/about/overview.html where they have this quote. "Our Tulsa Data Center consists of 30 mainframe computers with a capacity of 12,253 MIPs and over 60 terabytes of electronic storage - equivalent to over 15 billion pages of information."