Sabre (computer system)
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
GDS was the system travel agents use to access supply (lodging) that's been aggregated all in once place. Its importance has fallen as fewer people are using travel agencies, and OTAs (online travel agencies -- Expedia, booking.com) have created separate pools of supply.
I work in this area. If you need any help, questions, consulting, etc., email is in profile.
For reference, I used to work in the EMR space for a "value-added reseller" of a certain EMR package. It wasn't great. But when you looked at the other options, they weren't great either.
Eventually I learned that medical software is a ghetto because those who care about the medical part of it don't really care about the software part of it. At least not enough to treat it as the craft it is. And those who care about the software development tend to leave because you can do better work elsewhere.
So do you think GDS products suffer because no one cares about actually developing software, but rather the end goal?
If you think unix-commandline is cryptic in it's usage, then you should try gds-commands, which are often optimized to the single characters. Today you can use XML and JSON, but they are only build on top of those old systems, leading to many old crafty things.
The other big reservation provider.
http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/interactive_c/s...
... which was amazing in the day.
https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/sage/b...
You can see parts of the SAGE system at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. An interesting feature of the displays is a "light gun", used by the weapons director to select targets. Also of interest is the cigarette lighter and ashtray built right into the console.
The same technology in light pens and the NES Super Scope, involving a sensor in the gun and a sync-pulse on the display? Or was this an actual example of a CRT being used as a dual-mode transducer, both producing light and observing “unexpected” light above-and-beyond that produced?
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
> Google is designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently and produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems. The prototype with a full text and hyperlink database of at least 24 million pages is available at http://google.stanford.edu/
[..]
> Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
> Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.
-- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine"
From that (lip service) to the ElsaGate autoplay fiasco in under 2 decades, and of course using public resources to get the foot in the door. Par of the course.