Legacy code yeah, nobody's hitting File > New Project in COBOL

It's just that nobody understands how the systems work and they're ossified. Those systems are going to be emulated until our grandchildren take over because nobody can understand them well enough to craft a replacement. Juuuust up until an LLM rewrites them for us.

[edit] I mean those airlines systems are so old that they don't support special characters on names, passenger names are two fixed-length fields (first name, last name) and title and middle name just gets appended together.

So you get LASTNAME/FIRSTNAMEMIDDLENAMENTITLE on your bookings. And each of those fields is truncated lol.

and of course flight numbers are fixed at 4 digits, so we're running out of those.

Not exactly a great ad.