[mikeash]

Not really related to this outage, but I think it's interesting to note that Sabre dates back sixty years! The ball got rolling in 1953, with a chance meeting between AA's president and an IBM salesman. IBM was working on a massive air defense computer system at the time, and they decided that a similar system would be good for airline reservations. The system went live in 1960, and has been running continuously ever since.

[chrisrogers]

Indeed, this is one of the more interesting systems evolutions of our time. Its inspiration was the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), a cold war-era air threat assessment computer with real distributed qualities and light gun interfaces! By way of IBM, SAGE begat the Semi-automated Business Research Environment (SABRE, as it was then). It was the first GDS, and has operated in one form or another for 60+ years. Very impressive stuff, and humbling from the perspective of a mere software engineer. Working with such systems, with services interacting sometimes directly with green screens, is a far cry from Facebook and Twitter APIs, or ITA for that matter. This stuff is solid and vital, and the fear (not to mention cost) to manipulate it is astounding.