I spent some of my own time in a Sabre offshoot - a wild attempt to rewrite the TravelBase system. It had started out, as all of the Sabre system did, as a mainframe system. There were stories galore there; it was written in HuBol - named after Hugh, who's office was in the basement. If you had a question, you could ask Hugh - if he felt like answering, he would. Being close to retirement, his concerns didn't always match ours....

This was an attempt to rewrite the system - out of the mainframe and the Cobol offshoot, and over to OS/2 and C. You haven't seen hell until you've seen a bunch of Cobol programmers trying to do their first even driven, GUI based system in C. I spent 6 of the longest months of my life on that death march, and all I have to show for it is the wrist wrest under my keyboard, which has the official launch date - June 2, 1992. Don't you believe that the system actually worked then....[Cincom Smalltalk Blog]

Oh, yeah, TravelBase! I used to work in the basement of the STIN building with Hugh Wilkie, the creator of "HUBOL". I've heard it described as a blend of FORTRAN and COBOL with bit shift and rotate operators thrown in. Never saw any actual HUBOL code, but it was still kicking around at the time. ADS is written in HUBOL and is still in use in a lot of travel agencies, I believe. IIRC, ADS was originally written for some sort of minicomputer (DEC? Unisys?), and rather than port the original code, they wrote an interpreter to run the old binaries on a PC, and no doubt things are still the same. ADS was actually purchased by Sabre, and Hugh and Terry Jones (now CEO of Travelocity) came as part of the package. Hugh was still there in 1994-1996 while I was at Sabre, and he hung on until about 18 months ago during one of the downsizings. Last I heard, he was still looking for work. Which is pretty sad. IMO, Hugh was a really nice guy, and he created one of Sabre's most successful products, but he just didn't fit in any longer.