[coolhandluke]

> The reservation system itself runs on old school IBM big iron written in C. The system is so damn old that when you go southwest.com, all the information retrieved is done via screen scraping.

Man, say what you will about old mainframes and critical systems and C and COBOL versus racks of commodity x86 boxes and Java and Ruby and "scaling out" and load balancers and reverse proxies and ..., but those old business apps running on the AS/400s and mainframes?

They just work(TM).

I agree that these old systems need to come into the 21st century but some of the most stable, reliable systems I've seen in my career are 20- or 30-year-old applications running on that old iron.

(mmm, 5150, 3270, CICS, JCL, RJE, IBM printers as big as refrigerators... sigh... sometimes I miss those days.)

[x0x0]

Can we all agree that your point (while well taken)... is really really funny in light of the subject of this article? I'd say this was a pretty spectacular instance of just not working.

[ghshephard]

Well - a lot depends on what part failed - was it the backend big iron, or the front end scraping system?