Re:Technology That Changed Air Travel
by berkut on Sunday December 09, 2018 @06:22PM
(#18643971)
I've been in a different industry for 8 years now, but previously I was in the travel / airline industry working on backend booking systems: it was surprising at the time to me how much stuff was still done using things like VT320 terminals.
Interestingly back in ~2008, Amadeus did actually introduce some new XML web APIs for doing things, but they were so badly designed and slow that we ended up still using console terminal text entering / scraping as it was much faster for performing the same tasks (searching for flights, querying them and booking them).
And this terminal text entering / scraping code was pretty complicated as it had to cope with pagination on the terminals, scrolling text fields on the terminals, positioning, etc. Obviously only supported ASCII as well.
Interestingly back in ~2008, Amadeus did actually introduce some new XML web APIs for doing things, but they were so badly designed and slow that we ended up still using console terminal text entering / scraping as it was much faster for performing the same tasks (searching for flights, querying them and booking them).
And this terminal text entering / scraping code was pretty complicated as it had to cope with pagination on the terminals, scrolling text fields on the terminals, positioning, etc. Obviously only supported ASCII as well.