You mentioned Navitaire. They are not using TPF...they use COBOL on Windows (not kidding). They do have a large list of airline customers, but none with a big fleet. Reportedly, it doesn't scale up well enough to serve a large airline.
TPF also lives on in the financial world as well, like at Visa, for example.
New projects are cloud-first, and more and more stuff gets migrated or replaced with equivalents which run in whatever cloud provider. But I can't even imagine how the replacements for all these old legacy services would go down.
https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/2016-...
Number three on the the list is The DoD's Strategic Automated Command and Control System, which runs on "an IBM Series/1 Computer—a 1970s computing system—and uses 8-inch floppy disks". No biggie; it just "coordinates the operational functions of the United States’ nuclear forces, such as intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear bombers, and tanker support aircrafts."
This is a PDF from 2016 https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/scap-pia.pdf
> Standard CFOL Access Protocol (SCAP) is written in COBOL/Customer Information Control System (CICS). SCAP downloads Corporate Files On-Line (CFOL) data from the IBM mainframe at the Enterprise Computing Center, Martinsburg. The CFOL data resides in a variety of formats (packed decimal, 7074, DB2, etc.)
7074 format. weeps
You'll never write something that lasts that long.
You seriously underestimate inertia at financial institutions.
anecdotal, back in the late 80s I was in the USAF. Our secure communication center was running the first model Burroughs machine to not use tubes. It was that old. It could boot from cards, paper tape, or switches. The machine was older than many people who would be assigned to it. This was closely repeated in the main data center (personnel records, inventory, and such) which had a decade old system that migrated off physical cards by 89 but still took them as images off 5.25 floppy uploaded by PC)
Not even. They're still on mainframes.
To be honest, VB6 is much better than some of the other stuff they have around.
I now switched to a travel agency and am interacting with the Sabre blue screen systems that are similarly old.
The question is if moving to _anything_ more modern is less trivial/costly than keeping the current systems which appear to have many single points of failure/
That metric is often miscalculated as the initial cost is more of a deal than future revenue.
So they stay with antiquated mainframes and DOS interfaces.
Providing jobs for people like myself who can code in PL1, though I'd much rather take a brick to the face than do it again.
I would love to know what the cost of today's outage in terms of overtime, gate fees, fuel, additional crew, &c.
Delta's cost ~$150MM [1]. That's something on the order of a thousand mid- to senior- level programmers for a year in my area. Even if you allocate a quarter of that cost to computer costs (which I'm betting is a fairly large over estimate), that still leaves a sizable team.
> DOS interfaces.
TUI interfaces can be really, really efficient in terms of navigation and getting around. I rarely see GUI apps that function anywhere near as smoothly or keyboard only.
[1] http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2016/09/08/delta...
TUIs have a steeper learner curve, but I agree that once someone masters the hotkeys for that particular interface, they're much quicker. In addition, depending how old the computer is running the TUI, the staff may not be able to use the computer to browse anything else. ;)
Okay, I admit that I have absolutely no idea what software like that costs to build, but surely they could have rebuilt their entire software stack for that, couldn't they?
I worked on quoting an insurance policy core (just the core mind you, not the extras), and for a medium-sized insurance company it would reach that amount of money.
I suspect a complete rewrite would go into the billions.
It ends up not being that many people, but extremely high paid consultants (200 to 400 dollars an hour), and extremely high licensing costs. Some projects can go on for years, should be 1 to 2 years.
It's extremely profitable and very well paid, one such company, Guidewire, is one of the top 10 best paying employers in the U.S.
http://www.cio.com/article/3064769/careers-staffing/10-best-...
I meant DOS when I said DOS. Where you run into program/system memory split problems when you keep piling on features.
I shudder to think of a scheduling program as complex as an airline's ticketing system being run on a bit of software written by a thousand programmers in only one year.