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.
@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 Smith
Scott Miller 🇺🇦 🇺🇸
Stephen Hoffman