I worked at AA/Sabre in the mid 90s, straight out of college, although I was working on the PC side on the software they put in travel agencies. I left just after AA spun Sabre off into a separate public company. The mainframe software was done in TPF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_Processing_Facilit...) and I believe to this day a large part of it still is. IBM created a C compiler some time in the late 90s and this was considered a major advance for the platform. I believe that the system still runs on TPF with some parts written in C. Those programming jobs were not typical CS grads, most people simply had a HS degree or some college that could pass a logic test, the company had to provide their own training because there was no other way to gain experience with that environment.
On the subject of emulation, Sabre also had acquired a company called Agency Data Systems which was written for a Data General minicomputer using a language developed in-house. The guy who invented the language was named Hugh, so internally this was called "HUBOL" (the actual name was something else that only Hugh actually could remember). Some time in the 80s they decided to port it to a PC architecture but instead of porting ADS to a more modern language, they decided to build a DG emulator to run on a PC. When I was there, they were still updating the HUBOL source code (Y2K was a big deal at the time, plus with changes in the travel business, the updates were constant) but running on the homegrown DG emulator on a MS-DOS system. Hugh was quite a character. Back then we still had to wear a shirt and tie to work and Hugh's shirts all had these breast pockets that were stuffed with odd slips of paper. The joke was that he had run every project he'd worked on in the previous 30 years out of his shirt pocket, given the way things operated, there was probably some truth to that.
Somebody linked to Adam Fletcher's talk. Adam co-founded ITA which was eventually acquired by Google and probably is the basis for Google Flights. I saw a demo in probably early 1997 when they came around the startup I worked at looking for customers. Their software was written in Lisp and ran on a PC and was completely jaw-dropping. I never realized how bad Sabre's pricing software was until I saw what they were doing. ITA absolutely was the best pricing engine around at the time. In retrospect I probably should have quit my job and begged those guys to hire me.
It's possible that the reason there was no C for TPF is similar to why C arrived very, very late to CICS on S/390 (or z architecture).
Namely, C standard library was not reentrant safe, with considerable global variables et al - and the code on CICS (and I suspect TPF) had to be fully reentrant because it effectively ran inside green threads.
So, unless IBM wanted to advertise C that wouldn't contain standard standard library, modules written in C would be possibly dangerously playing with global side effects. Relatively recently this was solved by common runtime component whose name eludes me at this time, which underlies standard run times for C/C++ and I think Java, at least inside CICS
Due to my experience with C on Unix, I once did a contract to program in C on IBM/370 systems. It was extremely painful. Especially editing C code on 3270 terminal. C on 370 was driven by marketing to entice the porting of Unix hosted software to mainframe. AFAIK it didn't gain traction.
> Adam co-founded ITA which was eventually acquired by Google and probably is the basis for Google Flights
This is an absolutely wild pair of claims. Adam was nothing like (and does not claim to be) a co-founder and google flights is driven entirely by ITAs QPX product. ITA was a very good place to work.
My current contract position is with an airline (not American, but a partner) working on modernizing their check-in. We talk to SABRE a lot, through a middleware layer so we just do json/REST. BUT, the endpoints are just an insane mess. There's at least three different ways to get flight information, all requiring different request parameters (though usually airline, flight #, departure date & origin are enough) and one will return some subset of data, and another a different but somewhat overlapping subset.
It's kind of a joke to me that we're modernizing a small part of the whole system and still using 1960s-era backend systems. Polishing a turd.
I worked in their HR department in 2000 and 2001, building various systems to support compensation, performance review, etc. Significant part of the role involved working with DBAs who pulled data from those systems into our RDBMS, as we were using web languages of the day.
On the subject of emulation, Sabre also had acquired a company called Agency Data Systems which was written for a Data General minicomputer using a language developed in-house. The guy who invented the language was named Hugh, so internally this was called "HUBOL" (the actual name was something else that only Hugh actually could remember). Some time in the 80s they decided to port it to a PC architecture but instead of porting ADS to a more modern language, they decided to build a DG emulator to run on a PC. When I was there, they were still updating the HUBOL source code (Y2K was a big deal at the time, plus with changes in the travel business, the updates were constant) but running on the homegrown DG emulator on a MS-DOS system. Hugh was quite a character. Back then we still had to wear a shirt and tie to work and Hugh's shirts all had these breast pockets that were stuffed with odd slips of paper. The joke was that he had run every project he'd worked on in the previous 30 years out of his shirt pocket, given the way things operated, there was probably some truth to that.
Somebody linked to Adam Fletcher's talk. Adam co-founded ITA which was eventually acquired by Google and probably is the basis for Google Flights. I saw a demo in probably early 1997 when they came around the startup I worked at looking for customers. Their software was written in Lisp and ran on a PC and was completely jaw-dropping. I never realized how bad Sabre's pricing software was until I saw what they were doing. ITA absolutely was the best pricing engine around at the time. In retrospect I probably should have quit my job and begged those guys to hire me.