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 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 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!
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?
- 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.)
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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
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??).
> 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.
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
I love NASA design of their space probe telemetry/control views.. lol.
It's so pure.
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.
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.
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)
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?
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.)
this answers the question pretty comprehensively i think. https://theterminalist.substack.com/p/bloombergs-7-powers-an...
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.
Structured, deep and wide
You get the chat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49286955
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.
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.
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.
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"
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 :)
I wish we got more UIs like this.
Most modern apps are very lazy on being actually useful for people that use it frequently
Yes, but where are you going to place ads?
Nobody gets a promo from something that is working well for humans.
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.
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
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)
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
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.
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
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.
I did an internship in finance in college. Worked at a Bloomberg terminal that earned more money than me
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
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.
Any idea on what technologies/toolkits are used to build Bloomberg terminal?
I was working there when they switched to that font. A lot of people were furious that their cheese had been moved.
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!
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
Here’s a great talk to get you up to speed! https://youtu.be/y1MCLZm8yAY
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.
It's not very responsive
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.
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.
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 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.
The entire financial industry is based around unfair advantage.
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.
shit I really loved this, was searching for the history of bloomberg these days. thanks for sharing