You have to remember that the Cubic/TfL contract would have been negotiated in the early-mid 90s
In a previous life, I spent some time doing trawls of journal articles and patents looking for evidence of prior art, to invalidate tech patents that had been registered speculatively by parent trolls.
If anything, there was a very good appreciation of the way technology was likely to progress/which technologies might be able to be combined and I really think you don't give enough credit to academia or industry here. Expecting a ticket machine to have a reliable network connection at some point is not pie in the sky thinking.
Software and hardware changes would have been extremely complex and implemented in a way very different to standards and methods of today
I'm sure you didn't mean to come across as patronising here but..
Everything I do day to day is underpinned by protocols and standards (open ones!) developed well before I was born. TCP/IP was an established thing by '78. The filesystem hierarchy on my machine is pretty similar to what would have existed on a UNIX machine in the late 70s and early 80s. Hell, the fares engine that powers TrainSplit's journey planner is written in the same programming language that these UNIX userspace utilities would have been written in back then. What
has changed, for sure, is the scale of connectivity and computational power we all have access to - but even in 1965 people like Moore were predicting that memory and computational power would grow exponentially.
Accounting for changes that could reasonably be expected to happen over the long term is just good management practice, surely?
Likely an old/legacy system which was developed before the age of always connected machines, thus was never designed for this functionality as would have been unrealistic at the time, and the development work/cost has just never been requested/agreed (and would likely be large/significant work)?
Yes, I'd describe it as myopic. What
is clear is that TfL have boxed themselves into a corner now, and that there isn't effective competition - which is bad for everybody.