Bloomberg Terminal

IEEE Spectrum has published a retrospective on the Bloomberg terminal, the financial data workstation that has linked Wall Street professionals since the early 1980s. The piece traces how Michael Bloomberg's company turned specialized market data hardware and software into one of finance's most essential and enduring tools, and readers are discussing its legacy and continued dominance.

IEEE Spectrum has published a retrospective on the Bloomberg terminal, the financial data workstation Michael Bloomberg's company introduced in the 1980s and that remains a fixture on trading desks worldwide. Readers on Hacker News are discussing the article, trading hundreds of comments on the terminal's technology, its steep cost, and why it has held off competition for decades.

OpenBB, an open-source project aiming to build a free alternative to the Bloomberg terminal, has shut down after years of development. Bloomberg's terminal, a long-standing network for finance professionals that predates the public internet, remains part of what one commenter describes as a duopoly in market data infrastructure. Observers are pointing to the shutdown as a sign of how hard it is to unseat entrenched financial data platforms.