[iraqmtpizza]

meh. memory address is the ID

[L-four]

Airline booking numbers used to just be the sector number of your booking record on the mainframes HDD.

[rrr_oh_man]

That’s why they were constantly recycled?

[devsda]

This is such a simple scheme.

I wonder how they dealt with common storage issues like backups and disks having bad sectors.

[giantrobot]

They're likely record based formatting rather than file based. At the high level the code is just asking for a record number from a data set. The data set is managed including redundancy/ECC by the hardware of that storage device.

[switch007]

My jaw just hit the floor. What a fascinating fact!

[mauriciolange]

source?