It's so pure.
Of course. That's where all the hedge fund managers live.
There was one for visitor use at the Bank of America branch on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley at one time. But BofA closed that branch.
- real-time data on financial instrument prices;
- real-time news (own and syndicated);
- an email address (firstname.lastname@bloomberg.net) used to email and chat with other professionals on the Bloomberg network. This is like LinkedIn and WhatsApp combined for people in finance, and people can keep the address for two years after e.g. losing a job, so they can use the network to find a new role.
- analytical software: tools to calculate various KPIs to assess and analyze business opportunities.
- capability to transact: The BB terminal is not just an information system, it also permits you to buy and sell directly.
(My university has one BB terminal that MBA students can access and get training on.)
Next week it will be in Bloomberg Business Week, long after it had trading value. Bloomberg has its own news collection and analysis operation, bigger than almost all US newspapers.
I really wish there was a resurgence of information dense UIs and tools, optimizing for people who use them daily and not “use it once.” It really reminds me of the hate folks have for things like Eclipse or IntelliJ which are daunting at first but once you get over the shock and learn them really are amazing tools.
The difference is that Costco pays their employees well enough to keep them around (notice that Costco prints the start year on each employee badge- average retail length of service is 1 year, Costco keeps people around for decades) and so they can learn to use this older software and master it. Most retail operations optimize their inventory management for new people, because they don't expect someone to stick around long enough to master it.
My wife worked at a small regional chain of pharmacies that had an ancient MS-DOS based EHR system. And she mastered that system to the point where people would call her when she was home with me and ask her how to do something, and she would walk them through "okay, hit tab three times then shift-F12 then enter the frabble and then alt-F3 to go to the next screen and enter the drabble." It was difficult to learn it, but if you mastered it you could do everything you needed to do from just muscle memory while you were on the phone arguing with the doctor's office that their prescription was not correct and needed to be changed.
Then the small chain got bought by a national player and their brand new GUI system was brought in. It was a lot easier to learn- discoverability was a lot higher with menus and drop-downs and all of that. But if you stuck around to master it, you could never be as fast as you could with the older system. And that emphasis on quickly integrating new employees- but lower payoff for experience in employees- was clear in every choice that national chain made. They wanted their employees to be completely interchangeable, which meant that they didn't care if you had six months of experience or four years of experience or three decades of experience.
For me, it's typically a balance between speed and efficency of data to help you make decisions quickly, but should be able to be used by anyone with technical experience.
So less of both. Less 'pretty UI' and less "omfg here is every piece of information shoved together and you need to be a wizard to understand it"
Nobody gets a promo from something that is working well for humans.
Most modern apps are very lazy on being actually useful for people that use it frequently
• https://www.thebaron.info/archives/technology/reuter-monitor...
• https://www.thebaron.info/archives/technology/reuters-techni...
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.
Haven't seen that term in so many years/decades. Thanks for the flashback.
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.
this is a great video to watch if you're curious about how the bloomberg terminal ui was made. https://youtu.be/ODgs0eWAIKc
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17079033 (104 comments)
A look back: The Bloomberg Keyboard (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20742329 - Aug 2019 (55 comments)
A look back: The Bloomberg Keyboard (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17079033 - May 2018 (104 comments)
https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/8aiz67/how_...
However, I suspect you're coming at this from the perspective of a coder or a gamer or some other category who types thousands of keystrokes per day (tens of thousands?). With the assortment of special-function keys that enabled the user to execute common tasks with only two or three keystrokes, I suspect that even actively-used Bloomberg terminals may see an order of magnitude less keystrokes.
(On the third hand... I seem to remember reading that the Bloomberg system included chatroom functionality, which may increase keystroke count)
175 points on Aug 23, 2021 | 138 comments
Some people like it and projects like this have appeared: https://github.com/dchest/bergoom
I'd love to know how they make frontends as responsive as possible. To the engineering blog!
Agenda: https://github.com/tc39/agendas/blob/main/2026/09.md
E.g. $32k cost of business to make $2bn revenue statistically approximates zero.
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.