Here's how Wall Street traded before Bloomberg terminals were everything
Apr 17, 2015, 20:12 IST
EliteTrader
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Early Friday, Bloomberg LP experienced a "significant" unexplained outage of its terminals.
With the Bloomberg terminal outage, traders were forced to pick up the phone and do it the old fashioned way.
A Bloomberg Terminal is a must-have machine for traders. They use them to message others, obtain real-time market data, news, and stock quotes among many other functions.
Wall Street is pretty much spoiled by the incredible $20,000-per-year machine.
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Before broadband fired live quotes and analysis at the speed of light to our smartphones, traders used to read bid-ask spreads off of chalkboards and historical data off of miles of ticker tape.
We went way back to see how trading was done in the pre-Bloomberg terminal era. We even went back before ticker tape was a thing.With the help of images from the Museum of American Finance in New York, we put together a brief, visual history of trading technology, from ticker tape to the present. Editor's Note: Former Business Insider writer Rob Wile contributed to the original version of this feature.