Why it’s hard to kill the Bloomberg terminal (2019)
Around 1990 I worked for a company called equinet that was basically the &quot;Bloomberg of Australia&quot;.<p>At the time, the Australian stock exchange (ASX) ran its own sharemarket information service called &quot;Jecnet&quot;.  It was serial dumb terminals connected over phone lines back to an HP minicomputer&#x2F;mainframe in Sydney.  It was extremely popular amongst professional trading houses and institutional investors.<p>And the stock exchange decided to get out of the market providing information services, so they announced they were shutting down Jecnet.<p>So all the stockbrokers and institutional investors around Australia who used Jecnet - and there were alot - were going to lose their service.  They would all be forced to move to a new system, away from the one they knew well.<p>And this guy turned up at equinet - I think he had previously worked for the ASX.<p>What he had done, is written a DOS Modula2 application which was:<p>-- a little server application which ran on an 80486DX2<p>-- it listened on a serial port to the ASX price feed which came in at 9600BPS<p>-- it had a serial controller card installed with 16 serial ports attached<p>-- it cached the ASX price feed<p>And here&#x27;s the kicker - it pretty much exactly replicated the Jecnet functionality and user interface. (that&#x27;s my recollection anyway)<p>So what this guy had done is effectively replace the HP minicomputer with a drop in distributed async server that cloned Jecnet.<p>So equinet bought&#x2F;licensed this from him and went to all those Jecnet terminal subscribers and said &quot;you don&#x27;t need to lose Jecnet, we&#x27;ll just switch the serial connection from the ASX to us&quot;.  Brilliant success.<p>And in time many of those terminal users were transitioned to the much more powerful equinet Windows sharemarket information system.<p>But it was incredible at the time to see this guy essentially replace the entire functionality of the HP minicomputer system with this thing written to run on a 486.