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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

From the included link: https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/southwest-airlines-av...

> To give you an idea of just how outdated this operating system is, Windows 3.1 was originally launched in 1992, and Microsoft ended support for it on December 31, 2001, except for the embedded version, which was officially retired in 2008.

I keep hearing the Windows 3.1 story repeated. I mean here it comes from TechRadar and even has the "Pro" in the name, they can't possibly make stuff up, right? But still don't quite believe it.

Can anyone working at Southwest confirm that their main scheduling system is running on Windows 3.1?

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> keep hearing the Windows 3.1 story repeated

It’s wrong [1] and serves as a litmus test for whether an outlet independently verifies its claims.

(“The systems [Southwest] developed internally, SkySolver and Crew Web Access, look ‘historic like they were designed on Windows 95’.” That got mangled into they run 3.1.)

[1] https://www.osnews.com/story/140301/no-southwest-airlines-is...

Wow, that’s even more frustrating considering it’s conflating an unfashionable UI (which I’d argue is a good thing, since all modern UI trends are towards slick, minimalism-worshiping messes which hide everything from users) and old, provably-flawed technological foundations (like a 16-bit system without things like filesystem access control or memory protection).

I knew this story was false immediately though because no company ever even in 1993 had production server systems which ran a desktop OS like Win 3.1. It just wasn’t up to the task. They would have used NT if anything.

http://www3.alpa.org/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=IO7kd%2Bfm2Do... shows the system as of 2020. To the parent’s point, it’s actually quite a reasonable UX, with colored outputs, filter banks, and just enough abbreviations and whitespace to balance density with intuitiveness.

But that doesn’t mean this is the only modern design system that meets those requirements. And conflating all modern UI with consumer design trends is an equally frustratingly broad statement.

OK, this is definitely unfashionable looking if your main exposure to apps is the latest doodah on your phone that was literally updated yesterday.

Very standard looking legacy Win32 looking app. Which, admittedly, would have probably look very similar had it been on Windows 3, but is probably running on LTSC Windows 10 or something in reality.

Doesn't look Microsoft at all to me, just colored to mimic XP. Java on some Unix?

Page 7 (as labeled) of the slides. The tabs and checkboxes layout have a distinctly Win 9x era look/feel. I do agree that it's missing an obvious menu, and the theme for the window decorations reminds me of win 3.1, but that was probably an option for software of that era just as it is in this if someone pushes hard enough.

Perhaps you just aren't old enough? It looks very Windows 95 to me.

Age has nothing to do with it, the interface just doesn't look like Windows 95.

The button shapes, minimize/close window buttons, the titlebar are all looking wrong for Windows 95.

It looks significantly more like Swing, but then the buttons don't match that either.

It looks like every single hospital or car rental software I have managed to peek.

It's not old-fashioned, it is _timeless_ B)

Link worked for me but took a long time to load. It just seems like their server is overloaded.

Broken link

Windows 95 is an "unfashionable" OS which has not received any security updates since 2001.

Yes and the fact that my software’s UI looks like Windows 95 makes it vulnerable to all the same security vulnerabilities.

The systems don’t run on W95, they look like W95

Being blasted by media for running your own software, incredible. As others have commented, just a single tweet was enough to propagate this story. Quite concerning how easy it is to fake reality nowadays.

This is the same as the "Olympic cardboard beds are anti-sex" fake story that persisted. Anyone who publishes it demonstrates they don't actually research.

Thanks, I updated the post.

i miss the lemonodor blog

I know this is a hot take but companies have to figure out if modernization of a UI will be worth it to retrain everyone in the new UI. Many people were involved with its creation and maintenance and due to its age the UI may have a large amount of glue code that can't be separated unless you build an API around the other software. Especially if there is some kind of change in the system that moving off the old one is meaningless. Southwest is also making changes to their operations so they probably might be in maintenance mode for the software especially when the outage of their current software was done since they will have to not have anyone choose any seat at this time. [1]

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/investing/southwest-airlines-...

I don't know, I like the classic Windows UI. I don't think modern UIs are an improvement on that.

No no no. We must now have floating headers that don't give any indication they belong to the columns below them, much less that you can click them to sort the columns. 95% of possible actions must only appear when hovered over. Buttons should not look like buttons, nor should they provide any feedback that they've actually been clicked. Etc.

to be fair, some of the java-era software with their default toolkits do look very windows 3.1/95'ish (all that blue and teal)

Tech Radar quotes Tom's Hardware; Tom's Hardware quotes a tweet.

Not a tweet from Southwest, mind you. Not even a tweet from someone who says that they used to work for Southwest. Just... a tweet.

I just wish there was some type of identifiable credit / penalty system for writing accurately as a news source. And this would include quotes / retweets. Never been a better time to be wrong about everything.

> wish there was some type of identifiable credit / penalty system for writing accurately as a news source

Good starting point is if the news is free. A shocking fraction of people get their news from solely free sources.

And why would someone put in effort for free?

This is a misunderstanding of the problem. Effort is made in both cases. In one case effort is made to find verifiable truth as a service. In the other effort is made to provide eyeballs to advertisers.

What's "solely free"? Does the ad-driven model count as free? Why do you think an outlet that works for you will necessarily deliver better quality news that the one that works for advertisers? There are obvious bias downsides to both.

The ad-driven model does count as free, and it's far less likely to deliver better quality news than a subscription service users pay for. The core metric for ad-driven news sites is maximizing views—it doesn't matter how you get views as long as you get them. This means free sites are heavily incentivized to be the first to break a news story even if the details are wrong or sparse. Sure, they'll issue corrections and updates later, but only a small percentage of the initial viewers will ever see these, and there's essentially zero cost for having made the mistake.

The core metric for subscription news sites is minimizing churn. A mistake will cost a subscription site subscribers who have a massive lifetime value. These sites are heavily incentivized to report high quality, accurate news even if they're not the first to break the story.

> What's "solely free"? Does the ad-driven model count as free?

Yes, in this context.

> Why do you think an outlet that works for you will necessarily deliver better quality news that the one that works for advertisers?

I can’t explain the mechanics precisely. But it’s pretty clear when I compare my subscription and non-subscription sources where the quality lies.

Yet paying for news is a very weak guarantee of not being fed propaganda/inaccurate reporting.

If we held food safety to the same standards as paid news sources are held, people would get salmonella once a week.

Your cure is worse than the disease. The second such a system existed, it would be gamed to hell and back, and nobody would believe it anyway since they'd all angrily insist that "you shouldn't have counted X" or "you should've counted Y more" and it would just turn into a war over who got to control the system and use it to deplatform their enemies.

It doesn't have to, and indeed shouldn't, be a single system. We'd rather have a handful of independent news checker orgs, maybe some topic-specific ones. Funding remains an exercise for the reader.

There just isn’t. You just have to read enough of one source to determine your own opinion.

Just like with anyone you meet: you are the judge if they are trustworthy, nice, mean, funny, etc.

That said, I think tech journalism is the bottom of the barrel. I just feel like they focus more on tech than journalism.

the cost of producing bs is too low, back in the day it would at least require time and money to print / distribute.

Community notes on twitter is the closest thing to what you're describing I've seen yet. It's been very helpful too imo

A great example of why people don't trust journalists anymore. They don't even perform a basic amount of fact checking before publishing.

Articles from the likes of Tech Radar or Toms Hardware I would trust to a higher standard than a random tweet, but really I wouldn't label them as "real journalists"

I question the ethics and standards of the New York Times at least a little at this point so it's not like great journalism is common.

Also, there is the effect of a lie oft repeated becoming the truth - the times I've seen small outlets writing nonsense, and having it picked up by progressively bigger papers citing the smaller ones as credible sources is too much to count.

Generally there is a chain of trust in news publishing that goes nowhere and there's nothing we can do about it, as more often than not, someone credible repeats the hearsay nonsense down the line, at which point they count as a primary source.

So much of news publishing I would describe as not even wrong.

People don't pay for news anymore so we get what we pay for.

People never paid for news really. If you're thinking of the days when you had to pay 25 cents for a newspaper at the convenience store, that didn't come even close to the cost of running a newspaper in those days. Your quarter only covered (maybe) the cost of the paper and printing it. These days, we don't need paper, and running a web service is probably cheaper per-reader than physical paper.

Newspapers got the bulk of their funding from advertising back then, just as they do now.

The important thing is you were able to justify not paying for stuff.

I don't trust any kind of generalization like this, which only serves further disinformation and misinformation.

There are bad journalists (if they can be called journalists at all) and good journalists. At this point in history, our only hope lies with diligent reporters from reputable publishers.

It's unfair to pretend that all journalists have the same level of professionalism (or lack thereof) with regard to sourcing.

They don't.

It's kind of depressing to think that we have had this world-spanning system of knowledge and "hyperlinks" for decades now, individual pieces that should've enabled an easy chain of attribution/citation...

And encourage the reader to move away from your site‽ No self respecting PHB could condone such a thing.

I've started seeing this on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia sources an article from a semi-legit source. That semi-legit source either just says "sources" or points to something less-legit, like a Tweet.

You can bring new "facts" into existence by just laundering them from lower- and lower-quality sources.

Source-laundering is a bit catchy, I have to say.

The guy that started it all said it was just a "troll tweet":

https://x.com/ArtemR/status/1815408553131426179

The "Southwest uses Windows 3.1" claim is false, and is a great example of how bullshit can spread on the Internet once some semi "reputable" organizations repeat the false rumor:

https://kotaku.com/southwest-airlines-windows-3-1-blue-scree...

I worked for SITA ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SITA_(business_services_compan... )back in the late 2000's. They had a massive X25 serial network connecting airlines across the globe. Some of its customers were still running Windows 3.11 in the data center on old AT system. We would buy old computers on craigslist and ebay to keep hardware around for when it failed. I wouldn't be surprised if those systems are still in use today.

The San Francisco subway runs off of 5-inch floppy disks.

https://sfstandard.com/2023/02/02/sfs-market-street-subway-r...

That article links to an (only slightly older) article about British Airways loading navigation updates every month off of the fancy new 3.5-inch floppy disks.

> Can anyone working at Southwest confirm that their main scheduling system is running on Windows 3.1?

I can't confirm that, but I can certainly confirm lots of hospital equipment is still running Windows XP and lots of hospital personnel browse the internet with Internet Explorer.

This story is another example how hallucinations from LLM can successfully replace many "news" portals.

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