It’s still about data: “You can see the position of every ship in the world,” says Zach Haehn, head of R&D for Bloomberg’s San Francisco operation.
Bloomberg terminal features professional#
This is an area where milliseconds count.īloomberg Professional does get quite graphical in spots: For instance, it offers a feature that lets you track ships carrying commodities as they travel around a map, a bit of intelligence that can be very valuable to a trader. The default is still amber characters on a black background, a color scheme that was commonplace in the early days of computing–and that remains easy on the eyes even though it was long ago supplanted almost elsewhere else by black text on a white backdrop.
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In 2015 as in 1982, the investment pros who use the service like to gorge on data, so screens are dense with text, much of it in tabular form, complemented with charts where appropriate. well, terminal-like about Bloomberg Professional’s interface. (“People often refer to the ‘Bloomberg Terminal’ when speaking about the Bloomberg Professional service,” explains the Bloomberg website, which doesn’t have any choice but to confront the issue.) And enduring though the nickname is, it’s a wildly insufficient way to describe what the company offers today. One of the odd things about the moniker “Bloomberg Terminal” is that it’s a nickname rather than an official brand. It also upgraded the Terminal on an ongoing basis with new technologies: color, for instance, in 1991, and flat-panel displays five years later. In the late 1980s, Bloomberg successfully lobbied Merrill Lynch to end this restriction, whereupon it began to grow by 25% to 30% a year. ”You can’t go out and start a steel mill, but the position of the business cycle and the rate of technological change are such that people can go and start small companies when they have a few people with good ideas.”Ī Bloomberg Terminal keyboard circa 1990, with trackball and built-in voice-chat featuresĪs Bloomberg’s 1997 memoir Bloomberg on Bloomberg notes, Merrill Lynch owned 30% of his company in the early years and benefited from an exclusivity agreement that prevented Bloomberg from selling Terminals to Merrill Lynch’s major rivals. Michael Bloomberg himself talked like the startup guys of later decades when the New York Times interviewed him for a May 1982 article about launching companies during an economic downturn. “Bloomberg was this new startup that was nimble, that was experimenting, that was battling against the Goliaths of the time,” says Marguerite Gong Hancock, executive director of the Computer History Museum’s Center for Entrepreneurs. But just like today, being small, focused, and unburdened by legacy concerns was an advantage. It’s what enabled not only the Terminal but other devices such as 1984’s way-before-its-time QuoTrek, a wireless handheld gizmo for investors.īig companies such as Dow Jones and Reuters were eager to take advantage of this revolution in financial information, too.
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In the 1980s, stock exchanges from New York to Tokyo were going electronic, a prerequisite for a truly sophisticated online service for traders. But Bloomberg’s timing was fortuitous, even though the company got going during a raging recession. Technology companies had been working on bringing automation to the stock market for years, with gadgetry such as the Telequote III dating to the late 1960s. What a dual-monitor Bloomberg setup looked like in 1997, as demoed by Mike Bloomberg himself IMS called its product Market Master at first, and the 20 original units went into service at Merrill Lynch at the end of 1982. In 1981, at the age of 39, he took his $10 million severance and started a company called Innovative Market Systems, later to become Bloomberg LP.
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Michael Bloomberg had been a general partner at investment bank Salomon Brothers, where he was forced into a job heading IT development and then pushed out of the company altogether. The tale of its creation is one of a scrappy little company engaging in technological innovation, but it’s not the classic born-in-a-garage startup story. Yet it’s still recognizable as a descendant of its 1982 progenitor, just as a 2015 MacBook retains the DNA of the 128K model from 1984. It processes 60 billion pieces of information from the market a day. The Bloomberg Terminal of today–which, speaking more precisely, is a service known as Bloomberg Professional–provides more than 325,000 subscribers with everything from an array of information on financial matters to a chat system to the ability to actually execute trades. Bloomberg’s current dual-monitor system and specialized keyboard Good Timing