Interesting to note right at the start of the article that they sat on a plane next to each other in 1953 but the formal partnership between AA and IBM was not till 1959 - 6 years later! The article makes it look like all this happened magically fast but in reality a reminder that things take time!
>> is almost mythological. In 1953, C.R. Smith, president of American Airlines, was seated next to R. Blair Smith, an IBM salesman, on a cross-country flight. By the time they landed, the outline of a solution had been sketched. IBM and American Airlines entered a formal development partnership in 1959.
edit: oh and then the actual system didn't actually go live another 5 years later - in 1964. Over a decade after the two of them sat next to each other.
Reminder to myself when my potential customers don't sign the deal 5 minutes after my pitch!
I noticed that too and did roll my eyes as well but I'm glad I kept reading - its actually quite a good article. Maybe the author used an LLM to help do some copy editing but should have probably given it less editorial agency.
Either way I'm glad I read it and waiting for the other parts of the series. Really curious how to get access to this airline booking data so I can write my own bot to book my flights and deal with all the permutations and combinations to find the best deal.
It is interesting to think how AI will potentially change the dynamics back to this from general purpose software.
In a world where implementation is free, will we see a return to built for purpose systems like this where we define the inputs and outputs desired and AI builds it from the ground up, completely for purpose?
> It...handles 50,000 transactions per second with sub-100ms latency on hardware that costs a fraction of an equivalent cloud footprint. It has been doing this for 60 years.
Interesting to note right at the start of the article that they sat on a plane next to each other in 1953 but the formal partnership between AA and IBM was not till 1959 - 6 years later! The article makes it look like all this happened magically fast but in reality a reminder that things take time!
>> is almost mythological. In 1953, C.R. Smith, president of American Airlines, was seated next to R. Blair Smith, an IBM salesman, on a cross-country flight. By the time they landed, the outline of a solution had been sketched. IBM and American Airlines entered a formal development partnership in 1959.
edit: oh and then the actual system didn't actually go live another 5 years later - in 1964. Over a decade after the two of them sat next to each other.
Reminder to myself when my potential customers don't sign the deal 5 minutes after my pitch!
"The key insight is [...]. No daemons. No background threads. No connection state persisted in memory between transactions."
Closed the tab.
I noticed that too and did roll my eyes as well but I'm glad I kept reading - its actually quite a good article. Maybe the author used an LLM to help do some copy editing but should have probably given it less editorial agency.
Either way I'm glad I read it and waiting for the other parts of the series. Really curious how to get access to this airline booking data so I can write my own bot to book my flights and deal with all the permutations and combinations to find the best deal.
Can you explain why that’s wrong?
Can you add RSS to your site? I’d love to follow but can’t.
It is interesting to think how AI will potentially change the dynamics back to this from general purpose software.
In a world where implementation is free, will we see a return to built for purpose systems like this where we define the inputs and outputs desired and AI builds it from the ground up, completely for purpose?
> It...handles 50,000 transactions per second with sub-100ms latency on hardware that costs a fraction of an equivalent cloud footprint. It has been doing this for 60 years.
Eat that, Bitcoin.
50,000 transactions a second is a bunch for humans.
It’s nothing for even an ancient CPU - let alone our modern marvels that make a Cray 1 cry.
The key is an extremely well-thought and tested design.
Ah yes a completely centralized system that scales, who would have thought.
(For the pedantic, it's not exactly centralized nor federated since each airline treats their view of the world as absolutely correct)