Lions, Tigers & Monoliths

For years, I've wondered why organizations like Delta, American Airlines, Marriott, and American Express can't eliminate a mainframe-based general-purpose operating system called TPF (Transaction Processing Facility). TPF is a legacy mainframe operating system initially developed by IBM. It was released in the 1970s and was designed for organizations dealing in very high I/O message rates and large, continuous loads of complex transactions. TPF was traditionally an IBM System/370 assembly language environment for performance reasons. In 1979, IBM introduced TPF as a replacement for ACP a free Airline Control Program.

Today many of the companies mentioned above use TPF as a transaction system for their system of record. With all the advances over the past 40 years, some innovative young computer engineers could have found a distributed system replacement for this outdated system. The recent Amazon Prime Video team replacing an AWS Serverless system with a large monolithic service might explain why major airlines, hotels, and credit card organizations still use TPF.

https://www.primevideotech.com/video-streaming/scaling-up-the-prime-video-audio-video-monitoring-service-and-reducing-costs-by-90