A brief history of the Bloomberg terminal

spectrum.ieee.org

199 pointsrbanffy80 comments

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.

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!

If you're in New York City, the New York Public Library has a terminal you can use.

Wow, really? Do they limit your time on it? I would imagine that thing is in constant demand.

It’s a two hour time limit and you can only take pen and paper with you inside (no photos/data export)

There were two in the Greenwich CT library when I lived there in 2019, not sure if they’re still around.

> There were two in the Greenwich CT library

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.

I had occasional access to a Bloomberg terminal 20 years ago and I still miss it. I miss it a lot. I wish they offered a cheaper option for users who only need to use it infrequently. I mean, $25,000 annually is brutal if you're not a broker-dealer.

What does the terminal really give you that you can't get from various other data sources scattered around the Internet, like your brokerage's own API, third-party data sources, various forums and subreddits, ...? Is it just the real-time firehose nature of the thing?

Structured, deep and wide

The big one is that almost all of those data sources are subject to a 15 minute delay...

"Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg terminal".

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.

For many years ending around, a Bloomberg BusinessWeek paper magazine subscription was an incredible bargain. It was often possible (through tons of discount magazine sites) to get it for like $25 a year or less, and you could link that subscription online to get access to a lot of Bloomberg.com articles. Far from Terminal access of course, but I still really enjoyed the in-depth journalism and analysis. Around 2020 or so they pulled it off that type of distribution, now it's $100 a year and doesn't come with any online access other than the magazine articles themselves. And the full subscription to digital is $400 a year. It's priced just high enough to make it hard to justify for those who aren't real finance professionals. I really miss Bloomberg since the hard paywall went up.

You get the chat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49286955

this answers the question pretty comprehensively i think. https://theterminalist.substack.com/p/bloombergs-7-powers-an...

For instance, Bloomberg provide you with:

- 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.)

They have some public demos! https://youtu.be/ZAYiEyaUk2M?t=143&is=fXjn7PcE47Dw2Ayf

Yeah, I think this is something a lot folks miss when doing UI/UX these days. There’s an immense focus on new users, not on folks who rely on it day in and day out for actual work. I’ve seen loads of old, incredibly “ugly” UIs that absolutely mog newer friendlier attempts at the same. They’re absolutely intimidating to new users, but once folks learn it they’re indispensable and obviously intentional.

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.

You’re reminding me of this thread I found a long time ago where someone was talking about the old amber-screen library computers that felt FAST. The gif here shows what it would look like to read Twitter in that manner… https://x.com/apaprocki/status/1230241842928791552

Well there's a name I haven't seen since 2007

Hope you’re doing well! A lot has changed since then :)

https://x.com/scottew/status/1751357591375208689

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.

Same story at my bank. Tellers used to speed run through a TUI, hitting tab and other key combos to accomplish things. Now it's a long wait with them mousing around.

The best thing about all character-based applications I've ever used is the keyboard buffer. Even if you're using a TUI on a system that has a slow backend, it almost always blocked the thread and didn't consume from the buffer during waits, so if you knew the sequence of keys was "Total, F1, 1, Enter, Enter, Tab, 2125551234, F10, 1, Enter" you could just enter all those keystrokes as fast as you could and the system would eventually catch up with you, meanwhile you were bagging a purchase or counting out the cash, whatever.

The GUI also has lag - especially in the era of web-technologies-bloat, more lag than ever - but whether touchscreen or mouse there can't be a buffer, so each lag requires you to stare waiting for the next UI to be drawn.

Agreed. Also, you can try to satisfy both new and expert users. It take more thought and design, but that principle is in both Nielsen's Heuristics and Shneiderman's Golden Rules.

> Most retail operations optimize their inventory management for new people, because they don't expect someone to stick around long enough to master it.

Somehow I think I failed to think very deeply about this very important link! The twin happenings of the elimination of any retail career that pays a living wage, and the availability of GUIs and especially touch-screen GUIs happened simultaneously over a couple of decades, and the touch-screen dummy interface naturally won out. Not just because training that used to take two days for the 'green-screen' system I learned in 2001 now takes 15 minutes of instruction (and even that training is rather redundant for anyone over 95 IQ) -- also because the massive differential in productivity of an expert vs. new cashier/teller/pharmacy tech/etc. only even manifests if people are on the job long enough to become expert. And they're really not anymore.

Kinda why I prefer self-checkout. Even though the UI is firmly in "dummy" territory and I have to use a touch screen, I've used the current iteration of the self-checkout software more transactions than most cashiers I meet at Target, since they seem to have been there about 2 weeks on average.

I think that's the 'push/pull' problem though. Information dense UI that takes months or years to learn, or something that may be less information dense, but a monkey can learn it in minutes.

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"

I love displays from space vehicles and nuclear plants for the same reason. Data and controls organized in a dense but presumably highly usable manner. And it covers the more specific view of an expert in a particular subsystem, as well as the higher level view of those responsible for the whole system.

I love NASA design of their space probe telemetry/control views.. lol.

It's so pure.

Also on the input side: for instance here is a cheat sheet for a small part of the available keyboard commands: https://www.bbk.ac.uk/documents/bloomberg-cheatsheet.pdf

Yes, but where are you going to place ads?

Nobody gets a promo from something that is working well for humans.

I wish we got more UIs like this.

Most modern apps are very lazy on being actually useful for people that use it frequently

UI designers who were trained in the currently-popular paradigm would be at a complete loss to design such things. "Swipe left from the home screen, tap the nothingness on the screen to reveal the controls overlay, find the ••• in one corner of the screen, tap "More" in the 3-item menu, and then tap 'Bond Quote' in the modal dialog that takes over the entire screen." Keyboard shortcuts? "Hmm... interesting idea. Never thought of that. We might add those in a V2."

I would love to read up on how such interfaces (spaceship flight controls, avionics controls, etc.) are designed and the history of them. If anyone knows of any such resource, please point the way!

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.

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.

I would love to learn the specs of the original 1983 terminal. By the look of it, it's NTSC timings, so 200-ish lines, but it shows text and graphics, so it must have some bitmap capability. If I were to replicate the look, I'd use something that can display ReGIS or NAPLPS.

They ran iRMX on an 8080 variant and had graphics card that handled the A/V aspects. I suspected the displays could have actually been PAL because it had slightly higher resolution, but I haven’t been able to confirm that yet. I have one of those “Smithsonian” pieces on my desk waiting for me to have to some free time to try to repair the CRTs when I someday have more free time than I do now (any good resources for that??).

In these days I’d as my friend Claude.

> VT100

Haven't seen that term in so many years/decades. Thanks for the flashback.

> 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)

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

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)

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

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

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_...

it's saas with authenticated market data.. there's nothing to crack

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...

On one hand, at the price point of >$10000 for the whole terminal, it's quite possible that >$100 went into the keyboard.

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)

Especially if you're the BOSS - you may have a terminal, but you may transact by telling your underlings what to do on your behalf.

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

Some backstory on the font that Matthew Carter designed is here: https://www.bloomberg.com/company/stories/how-bloomberg-term...

Some people like it and projects like this have appeared: https://github.com/dchest/bergoom

Thanks! bergoom looks promising - no monospaced variant, but I think that can be done.

I was working there when they switched to that font. A lot of people were furious that their cheese had been moved.

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

Ocaml at Bloomberg, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278553

175 points on Aug 23, 2021 | 138 comments

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

Nowadays the desktop software is built around Chromium. Lots of C++ and one of the largest JS codebases in the world.

> largest JS codebases in the world.

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

Here’s a great talk to get you up to speed! https://youtu.be/y1MCLZm8yAY

It's not very responsive

From memory when I worked there 10 years ago, all the Javascript based stuff was pretty slow in a very noticeable way. They've likely gotten better as they are using a well known Javascript and rendering engine, so they're getting many optimizations for free.

They're very involved in web standards. Rob Palmer from Bloomberg is co-chair of TC39.

We’re in the middle of TC39 plenary in Tokyo right now as a matter of fact! Rob regularly posts on X as things advance through the staging process, and today is the final day.

Agenda: https://github.com/tc39/agendas/blob/main/2026/09.md

It used to be built with qt, now I'm guessing the answer is vanilla JS and CSS. You'd be surprised how fast they are without frameworks like react

It has never used qt in any way.

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.

The entire financial industry is based around unfair advantage.

Yeah, but I think they just sell convenience and there are projects on GitHub like openbb that piece together something very similar for much less.

In finance, people who consider the cost of a Bloomberg terminal "expensive" are often considered "not serious" (small fish)... it has often been seen as a status symbol as well as a professional work tool.

Not really. If you ran a restaurant instead, you may also have to buy a few thousand dollars worth of ingredients and pay thousands of dollars in salaries per year and renting a venue to make the revenue that you are making. Even a pizza delivery service may need a few thousand dollars a year for a car and its driver plus petrol, taxes, insurance. Relevant is not the cost of doing business, but the annual revenue and margins.

E.g. $32k cost of business to make $2bn revenue statistically approximates zero.

that's a perverse way of looking at the cost of a service offering.

If that were true, it would cost more than a Toyota RAV4

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.

Can you expand a bit more on this? What first principles?

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

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