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Comment by kalleboo | Hacker News Reader

One place I lived had train ticket machines from the 90's that were an analog of Teletext. If you knew the 3-digit zone code for your end station, you could just jam in the zone code, adult, buy ticket, pop in your magstripe card and have a ticket in 5 seconds flat. It was absolutely perfect.

They were then replaced with user-friendly Windows-powered machines where buying the most basic ticket took 2 minutes as you had to poke though pages of stations on a crap resistive display.

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Some time back there was an article about the use of floppies in the Norwegian health service. The reason for it was that some doctors stuck to their DOS based patient journals, as they were fully keyboard operated. Thus they were able to operate them by memorizing the inputs, and could bring up various info without taking their focus of the patient.

And i have observed similar in stores that used DOS based POS terminals, where the operator could add your latest purchase and bring up warranty history with barely a glance at the screen.

And in a more modern sense, i see people getting all giddy about the Android based Blackberry phones because now they have an actual keyboard to use. Meaning that they can hammer out a text or similar on tactile alone.

Airlines use a command line interface for managing passengers. It definitely looks like it has a steep learning curve, but they can get things done pretty quickly.

It certainly is. I worked on one of the first web flight booking systems. They ran over X.25 too, but you could run a very large office of agents over a single 64K X.25 link.

They were back ended by mainframes, which had page-based displays.

Actual command line, or just good old-fashioned terminal forms/curses/etc interface?

Usually it's a terminal emulator (in most cases implemented in Java) providing a thin client to a mainframe or Global Distribution System, such as Amadeus. This type of frontend is being phased out but the new systems usually have a requirement to maintain the exact same keyboard mappings so that the GUI can be navigated in the same way as the terminal.

Huh, found this video about one of those systems, pretty interesting UI actually. For most parts it is very much a true command line interface, and pretty hard-core with everything abbreviated to minimum.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jupRvrLcB_g

Also the wiki has this interesting snippet:

> Amadeus is a computer reservation system (or global distribution system, since it sells tickets for multiple airlines) owned by the Amadeus IT Group with headquarters in Madrid, Spain. The central database is located at Erding, Germany.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeus_CRS

Which kinda implies that all terminals all around the world are connected to one single database! I imagine they have fairly hefty mainframes in the backend.

The truly fun thing for someone working on these systems is each booking is just a flat text file with the line prefix indicating what is on the line. Sometimes when we need to implement new features/products we just have to use a generic remark (RX) and kind of coordinate with each other about what it means (or not, which sometimes causes fun when trying to manage interline bookings).

Another fun fact is that the booking records are recycled, the frequency of which depends on how many bookings there have been recently. The storage is "infinitely scalable" until the number of seats on planes starts to outgrow the number of bookings that we can hold.

I still see many shops with modern VESA mounted mini PCs running an AS/400 terminal emulator to access their inventory systems.

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