The Problem That Built an Industry

How a conversation on a plane in 1953 became the software that processes 10,000 flight bookings per second — and why it still does.

The Problem That Built an Industry

Part 1 of 6 in the Iron Core series — the 60-year-old infrastructure that flies 4.5 billion people a year.

In December 2025, someone at Technogise opened MakeMyTrip's corporate platform, typed in a destination, and booked me two flights to London. The whole thing took under a minute. A confirmation email landed in my inbox. Six-character booking references appeared: DDTCIV and DHB4AL.

I was going to speak at ContainerDays 2026. A conference about containers, orchestration, and cloud-native infrastructure — the kind of modern, ephemeral, stateless systems I spend my working life thinking about.

The irony only hit me on the flight over.

The infrastructure that booked those flights was designed in 1960. It runs on an operating system that predates Unix. It speaks a command language built for teletypes. It has been running continuously, without a full rewrite, for over six decades — and it handles roughly 10,000 transactions per second at peak.

I build distributed systems. I thought I understood complex infrastructure. Then I looked at my own boarding pass and pulled the thread.

This is a six-part series about what I found.

The World Before SABRE

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