Thanks for the article, interesting read!

In 2016, AUS airport a colleague and I at the gate offered our seats for a later flight and ~$500 cash. The helpful attendant starts "searching" for a possible double-ticket in their system, to my biggest surprise, not really using the mouse but just typing, like "hackers" in movies.

At one point she tells us disappointed she couldn't find anything, and turns the monitor to show it to us. Both working in IT, we look at the screen totally astonished: 80x25, white-on-blue, looks like a hex editor (pairs of letters clustered), and the lady continues to type in commands, with the speed of how people play candy crush nowadays, not how a flight attendant would use a CLI :-D

Since then I know what GDS is and how it looks like

It kills me now going to a gate and the agent is using a GUI. It’s so insanely slow compared to a good, experienced, gate agent using the CLI.

Deskilling has been brutal in the airline industry. Replacing that good, experienced, union-paid gate agent with a outsourcing-thrice-removed permatemp worker has brought costs down considerably. Making the systems easier to use has been crucial in enabling that.

Haha awesome anecdote, the "hacker typing" thing always took me by surprise too!

Just in case, Dilbert's view on the matter:

https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-12-24

Scott Adams’ views should be taken with a grain of salt: http://comicsalliance.com/scott-adam-sexist-mens-rights/

Oww, comeon, it is a simple comic strip, no need to make a case of something the Author wrote once and with which you may (or may not) be in disagreement.

Not as if it matters, but it's actually 64x25 in most GDSes.

Nice. Where did you found the information about the origin of the GDS? Was it difficult? Once I researched a lot and I didn't find too much.

I worked integrating software with GDS systems for some years, and I co-own a travel agency. I also built a tool to help travel agents, it translates some GDS codes to a human-readable format: www.easypnr.com

How did you find the information about how to interpret the black screen? Thank you for writing your article, I bookmarked it.

I have so many thoughts of this industry, and I also a personal theory of why we can't kill the command interface.

Cool article, but the info about the timezones don't make sense. You say SFO/T-7 means SFO is 7 hours behind GMT, and LHR is at GMT¥8 meaning it's 8 hours ahead of SFO.. but if LHR is at GMT and SFO is 7 hours behind GMT, how can LHR be 8 hours ahead of SFO? That doesn't add up, and honestly it made me wonder if you were just making up your own interpretation of the info...

Also, looking up the Tango timezone in maps shows me it's not Pacific Standard Time.

Hi — sorry, looks like I messed up the timezone details. In the case of daylight savings time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time), SFO is 7 hours away from GMT. But LHR is still 8 timezones away from SFO. You're right that it shouldn't read `LHR/GMT`, but `LHR/BST`.

Then the flight date needs to be adjusted too, December 12 is not during DST for both of those locations.