Re: How very dare you
The cruel 90s world of paper was actually the cruel 90s world of computers, and AFAIR didn't go down like this
Correct. AFAIK it was running from mainframes, and although it took some time to learn the system, once you knew how to use it it was actually so fast that later attempts to stick a GUI on it stubbornly faltered because it would inevitably slow things down again - the one thing the already thinned-out herd of check-in people could not afford. The check-in system was IMHO a classic example of a system that quite simply did the job, and in pretty much the most efficient way possible.