Southwest’s tech debt hurt it back in 2022 but it seems to be doing it some favors today.
Old Windows taketh away, but sometimes old Windows giveth.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/southwest-cloudstrike-windows-3-1/
EDIT: Fix date
EDIT: @peterbutler pushed me to do a little more research, and I’m more comfortable saying it the underlying software probably dates to Windows NT or XP.
And yes, it’s true. Some links with additional context:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/southwest-unions-warned-company-outdated-145652723.html
Essentially Southwest self-built/modified its own booking systems, ensuring long-term technical debt, and has been maintaining them since the ’90s and early 2000s.
(EDIT for updates after additional research)
but … where is the evidence stuff is running on Windows 3.1?
I see quotes about Windows 95 in the Forbes and Morning News articles but nothing about 3.1
Dallas:
>> “Some systems even look historic like they were designed on Windows 95.”
Forbes:
>> By some accounts, major portions of Southwest’s scheduling system for pilots and flight attendants is built on the Windows 95 platform
@ernie The 3.1 headline seems to come from a single Twitter account:
https://x.com/ArtemR/status/1814206932993118695
Which seems like it might be a joke?
@peterbutler This document from the Air Line Pilots Association has screenshots of the software in question. https://www3.alpa.org/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=IO7kd%2Bfm2Do%3D&tabid=11702&mid=33968
“Crew Web Access” appears to be a primitive, ’90s-era web interface, accessed through a browser webview on a smartphone, that offers crew members access to the software: https://appadvice.com/app/crewweb/391782836
@peterbutler Per this document, the original developer of the SkySolver software is Julian Pachon, who developed the software for Navitaire in the early 2000s. (Per his LinkedIn page, which I won’t link, Pachon now works in logistics tech for Amazon.) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/palgrave.rpm.5160041
The trademark dates to 2004: https://trademarks.justia.com/785/09/skysolver-78509597.html
Fleet management at car rental companies aims to maximise yield by matching capacity to current and projected demand. This is accomplished via three decision-making phases. The first phase involves the grouping of car rental locations into pools, allowing car rental locations within a pool to share a fleet of vehicles. In the second phase, the types and quantities of vehicles to be acquired and returned to the car manufacturer and the geographical redistribution of vehicles among pools over the long-term planning horizon are defined for each pool. The final phase involves the daily operations in which the deployment of the fleet within each pool among its locations is defined. In this paper, we address all three phases as we encountered them in a major US car rental company. We develop appropriate solution methodologies for all three phases taking into account the hierarchical nature of the decision process. Finally, the application of the entire methodology is exhibited via a case analysis for the state of Florida.
@peterbutler However Navitaire has been in this space a long time, purchasing its first software package, Open Skies, in 2000 from HP.
OpenSkies dates to the ’90s and earlier and ran on HP minicomputers until they stopped selling the hardware, forcing Navitaire to upgrade and rebuild. https://books.google.com/books?id=hyDkcWWyD_4C&pg=PA20
So to answer your question, the software is old and has a legacy that goes back to the Win 3.1 days, at least, but is more likely to be running on XP or Win 2000.
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@ernie This makes me wonder how much software is still running on some flavor of VMS. I know that 10 years ago, I'd heard of a few shops where some legacy app was still hosted in VMS. Per Wikipedia, OpenVMS had an update earlier in 2024, so presumably a few orgs still have mission-critical stuff still running on it.
(My first college programming course used UCSD Pascal on VAX/VMS, running on DEC VMS hardware, circa 1992.)
@scottmiller42 @ernie There are sites still running OpenVMS, yes.
The current vendor VSI ported OpenVMS to x86-64, as well.
And for completeness, there have been cases of malware including viruses on VMS. Rare, but it has existed. The worms including WANK were a bit more widely known.
@ernie Meme-guy-tapping-head: "Running Windows that is too old to run Cloudstrike (or any other modern security software suite)."
"Looks like you're trying to pilot a commercial aircraft. Can I help?"
IIRC, Windows 3.1 would not auto-update even if you had Trumpet installed. 🙂
@ernie omg. My wife is supposed to fly Southwest today and she just told me that Southwest says everything is fine, and I thought, “Maybe because they’re running on PDP-11s or something.”
Guess I was right.
@ernie okay now that is actually hilarious. I remember uncovering an old PC that my grandfather had to write his memoirs.
That thing was running 3.1, and he refused to get anything newer because he loved the simplicity of it.
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