A brief history of the Bloomberg terminal

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.

For completeness' sake, here's also a history of competitor REUTERS' terminal:

• https://www.thebaron.info/archives/technology/reuter-monitor...

• https://www.thebaron.info/archives/technology/reuters-techni...

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.

> I especially love that Gross taped his login and password directly on his keyboard, which makes the object more relatable. I may never know what it’s like to manage billions in assets from a Bloomberg Terminal, but I absolutely understand the trial of remembering my passwords.

Wow, what a great history artifact. It is hard to look at this and not wonder where did we go wrong. Everybody _should_ know better, and yet here we are. And now immortalized in the National Museum of American History for all posterity.

Related: A look back: The Bloomberg Keyboard

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17079033 (104 comments)

Andrew Paprocki: Bloomberg: home-grown server-side scripting

this is a great video to watch if you're curious about how the bloomberg terminal ui was made. https://youtu.be/ODgs0eWAIKc

I wish that article showed what the display looks like instead of just the keyboard. Others here have mentioned the lovely information density; I'll have to search elsewhere to see it

Love how those dense screens make numbers checkable at a glance. Tiny shops still live that gap—bank lumps vs invoice lines—just without a dedicated terminal.

Have we made any progress on a cracked version?

https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/8aiz67/how_...

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...

I did an internship in finance in college. Worked at a Bloomberg terminal that earned more money than me

Does someone know any font that is similar to the closed-source Bloomberg terminal font? I really love that font.

It may be of interest to some that Bloomberg has an ocaml based DSL built in for pricing exotic derivatives.

Any idea on what technologies/toolkits are used to build Bloomberg terminal?

Zitron must get on this ASAP it will make his day

At $32,000 a year per person the Bloomberg Terminal is a deeply unfair advantage for the rich to get richer.

Not to sound like a YC fanboy here, but I love how pretty much every great business can be traced back to a start which somehow follows what YC talks about today.

I guess the first principles of what makes great Founders and great businesses from back in the gilded age to today have stayed the same.

[flagged]

shit I really loved this, was searching for the history of bloomberg these days. thanks for sharing