A Brief History of the Bloomberg Terminal

(spectrum.ieee.org)

44 points | by rbanffy 2 hours ago

7 comments

  • rbanffy 41 minutes ago
    I have the highest regard for these terse, but information-dense displays that enable humans to quickly grasp all information they need to do their jobs, and nothing more. This is also something avionics provide - a modern cockpit displays are a work of art in layering needed information for what is happening at the time, both the dense PFD and the much specific that communicate aircraft status.
    • nxobject 4 minutes ago
      I know it's impossible, but I've always loved to get a hands-on demo... I'd love to learn the UI patterns involved, for example. I can always make my Emacs faster to interact with, dammit!
  • nxobject 7 minutes ago
    The article has an image of terminal keyboard used by a legendary trader... the key-caps are immaculate; the letters haven't faded at all. Amazing. I wonder if they were double-shot...
  • mandevil 21 minutes ago
    The modern Terminal is based on a private fork of Chromium to give it the look and feel of a VT100 terminal, and integrate their private networking and security technologies. The BBT predates HTTP, and backwards compatibility is hugely important to the company- they have a museum where a second-generation Terminal from ~1985 shows the current news, because they are so dedicated to backwards compatibility that they still can support the 1985 hardware.
    • apaprocki 13 minutes ago
      This isn’t really true. The old terminal monitors are essentially dumb CRTs and the the museum pieces are just displaying the output from a regular PC running the modern app converted to an appropriate signal + BNC connectors so you see something and not just a black screen.

      The old terminal hardware communicated over dedicated serial lines and worked in conjunction with many other “server-side” pieces of software that no longer exist, so it would be impossible to make one function as it did back in the day.

  • Flex247A 21 minutes ago
    Any idea on what technologies/toolkits are used to build Bloomberg terminal?
    • apaprocki 18 minutes ago
      Nowadays the desktop software is built around Chromium. Lots of C++ and one of the largest JS codebases in the world.
      • nxobject 10 minutes ago
        > largest JS codebases in the world.

        I'd love to know how they make frontends as responsive as possible. To the engineering blog!

  • hangrybear666 34 minutes ago
    Zitron must get on this ASAP it will make his day
  • gitghxst 21 minutes ago
    shit I really loved this, was searching for the history of bloomberg these days. thanks for sharing
  • sophietaylor 36 minutes ago
    [flagged]