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Posted by rbanffy 8 hours ago

A brief history of the Bloomberg terminal(spectrum.ieee.org)
195 points | 78 commentspage 2
johnhamlin 4 hours ago|
I did an internship in finance in college. Worked at a Bloomberg terminal that earned more money than me
graboid 5 hours ago||
Does someone know any font that is similar to the closed-source Bloomberg terminal font? I really love that font.
raldi 25 minutes ago||
I was working there when they switched to that font. A lot of people were furious that their cheese had been moved.
apaprocki 4 hours ago||
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

graboid 4 hours ago||
Thanks! bergoom looks promising - no monospaced variant, but I think that can be done.
mhh__ 5 hours ago||
It may be of interest to some that Bloomberg has an ocaml based DSL built in for pricing exotic derivatives.
kristianp 1 hour ago|
Ocaml at Bloomberg, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278553

175 points on Aug 23, 2021 | 138 comments

Flex247A 6 hours ago||
Any idea on what technologies/toolkits are used to build Bloomberg terminal?
apaprocki 6 hours ago||
Nowadays the desktop software is built around Chromium. Lots of C++ and one of the largest JS codebases in the world.
nxobject 6 hours ago||
> largest JS codebases in the world.

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

apaprocki 6 hours ago|||
Here’s a great talk to get you up to speed! https://youtu.be/y1MCLZm8yAY
ascorbic 4 hours ago||||
They're very involved in web standards. Rob Palmer from Bloomberg is co-chair of TC39.
apaprocki 1 hour ago||
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

Scubabear68 5 hours ago||||
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.
mhh__ 6 hours ago|||
It's not very responsive
alightsoul 5 hours ago|||
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
apaprocki 5 hours ago||
It has never used qt in any way.
hangrybear666 6 hours ago||
Zitron must get on this ASAP it will make his day
UltraSane 5 hours ago||
At $32,000 a year per person the Bloomberg Terminal is a deeply unfair advantage for the rich to get richer.
alightsoul 3 hours ago||
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.
jll29 2 hours ago||
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.
jll29 2 hours ago|||
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.

anonu 2 hours ago|||
that's a perverse way of looking at the cost of a service offering.
frakkingcylons 2 hours ago|||
If that were true, it would cost more than a Toyota RAV4
Shiggy_ 4 hours ago||
The entire financial industry is based around unfair advantage.
Zaraif13 2 hours ago||
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.

nkzd 54 minutes ago|
Can you expand a bit more on this? What first principles?
sophietaylor 6 hours ago||
[flagged]
gitghxst 6 hours ago|
shit I really loved this, was searching for the history of bloomberg these days. thanks for sharing