A closer look
First commercial passenger flight booked over the internet occurred in 1995, forever changing the agonizing process of coordinating human travel. An obscure regional carrier called Alaska Airlines pioneered the digital booking system, allowing brave early adopters to bypass terrible hold music and slightly condescending travel agents for the very first time. Customers had to navigate a remarkably crude interface on incredibly slow dial-up modems, manually typing in credit card numbers with absolute blind faith that their data was not being beamed directly to criminals. It was hailed as the ultimate convenience at the time, blissfully unaware that it would eventually evolve into an anxiety-inducing nightmare of clearing browser cookies just to prevent predatory algorithms from instantly jacking up flight prices
