Common Lisp: Inside Sabre

bugbear writes "I just got permission from the author (Carl de Marcken of ITA Software) to publish this email, which describes the inner workings of Sabre, the flight search software that the airlines and travel agencies use. It is a case study in cheap Linux/Intel, NT/Intel and Hpux boxes replacing mainframes, and also the use of lisp and other languages in a server-based app. Update: 01/16 13:45 GMT by H :RawDigits writes "Common Lisp: Inside Sabre - correction. The Lisp engine is used by Orbitz, and not Sabre. Sabre still maintains mainframe systems for their booking. I should know, I am sitting in the Orbitz NOC right now ;)"

Comments

saber and Kasnas City

[thogard]

years ago I had a chat with some nice people in blue suits who wanted to know what I knew about an airline system in Kasnas City and what I knew about programming. Turns out that a friend of mine told the nice men in blue suits that I had taught him how to program. He was part of a group of "evil hacker" types and one of them had been running a multi channel BBS. The BBS had two lines and was running on a vic 20. Now the odd thing about this BBS is you could upload as much stuff as your 110 baud modem could choke on and weeks later it was still there. This was odd considering the best you could on a vic 20 was maybe 8 single sided floppys. It turns out that someone from this evil computer club had found out how to transfer stuff off to one of the backup mainframes and he was using that for storage and all the vic 20 was doing was multiplexing data streams and sending out ansi graphics. I still consider that one of the best all time hacks I've heard of.