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A look back: The Bloomberg Keyboard (2017)
- sigfubar 8y agoBloomberg excels at many things, but most of all it squarely nails the UX for users who're getting things done for a living. I really miss my BB keyboard; but I'm happy to still enjoy the Bloomberg font in my regular Unix terminal.
- datanut 8y agoAny details about the font? Download links?
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 8y agohttp://www.bloomberg.com/professional/systems-support/downloads/ http://www.bloomberg.com/professional/systems-support/downlo...
- RyanShook 8y agoIs there any open alternative to a Bloomberg terminal? With Google Finance now gone I’d like to get see what is out there for free.
- eli 8y agoThere are barely any true proprietary alternatives, let alone open ones.
- clausok 8y agoThat's true. There's a reasonably steady flow of articles on prospective "Bloomberg Killers"; this one in Institutional Investor (July 2017), Can Anyone Bury Bloomberg, is the best researched and informative that I've seen so far: https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1505pdwt02550/can-anyone-bury-bloomberg#.WYsU91GGNPY https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1505pdwt02550...
- swyx 8y agoi used to work at Sentieo (competitor to Money.net), can answer any questions that dont get me sued.
- genieyclo 8y agoHow legit a tool is Money.net? The founder's book on oil is amazing, but I've always been curious about Money.net
- Blackthorn 8y agoI tried it a long time ago (1.5 years?), it sucked. It had pretty much the same fundamentals information you could get anywhere, including the tools that come with an Interactive Brokers account. And...that's it. Nothing else. I wanted to pull up some options data and run some calculations. Very doable on something like Bloomberg, provided you read the manual (the school nearby has a terminal; I could certainly never justify the cost). It's like money.net had never even heard of an option. No analytics capabilities whatsoever.
- swyx 8y agowhat the other guy said. if you're a Bloomberg user, all you'll notice are the missing things. it is a prosumer offering, it doesnt suck, it just isnt targeted for you
- bonaldi 8y agoNote that they've got the patent for keyboards with speakers in, which is why you can't get them anywhere else. 1
- smnrchrds 8y agoAccording to the article, their first speaker-integrated keyboard was released in 1992. That's 26 years ago. Patent term is only 20 years in the US. The patent must have expired long ago.
- nereye 8y agoCompaq released a keyboard with speaker in 1994 (Vocalyst keyboard, as part of the Deskpro XL system).
- adventured 8y agoCheck out Verbatim's keyboard from a decade ago (with built-in speakers): https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/11/technology/personaltech/11keyboard.html https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/11/technology/personaltech/1... It didn't sell well. The reason keyboards don't have speakers today, is more likely because there isn't much demand for it. It would add bulk, cost and complexity to keyboards, with a likely underwhelming audio result.
- toomanybeersies 8y agoI'm sure that I had a keyboard with speakers in it years ago in the early 2000's.
- dfox 8y agoIntergraph workstations in mid 90's almost universally came with NMB keyboards with integrated speakers. The keyboards were bulky and had half inch quite rigid cable. Notably, John Carmack used such workstation for Quake 2 development.
- ohstopitu 8y agoI truly do wish we have an open source / SaaS version of the bloomberg B-Unit[0]. I would easily pay $10/m for a "personal" version and I know companies that would pay 2x - 3x that for enterprise deployment. Although to an extent - it's redundant now that we have phones with biometric authentication. [0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/professional/support/b-unit/ https://www.bloomberg.com/professional/support/b-unit/
- zeth___ 8y ago>I would easily pay $10/m for a "personal" version and I know companies that would pay 2x - 3x that for enterprise deployment. Although to an extent - it's redundant now that we have phones with biometric authentication. You're off by a factor of 10 on how much a service like that will cost, especially in enterprise.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sjs7007 8y agoWhat do you want to use it for? Can you not using something like Google Authenticator for 2-factor auth?
- danvayn 8y agoI imagine that beyond the obvious "what if I lose control of my device(s)" justification people really just want dead simple authentication. It's a password you always have on you and as long as it's never copied its quite secure, atleast in that you have a complex password unique to you that can be applied in an instant while still being a significant form of verification. that said, I'm sure that spoofing a fingerprint is easier than I'm imagining and that there's probably plenty of insecurities in BMA..
- dillondoyle 8y agoSomewhat interesting video from Bloomberg on their hardware, starts with a bit of historical footage: https://vimeo.com/90701077 https://vimeo.com/90701077
- farhang 8y agoWeirdly long gap in the visual story between 1996 & 2004
- audiometry 8y agoThat current “starboard” keyboard is atrocious. Over the last couple years I’ve killed probably five of them with trivial levels of coffee spills. They seem super-sensitive to any kind of debris. Way more than any other keyboards I use, including those of laptops.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- phyalow 8y agoWe keep a running tally on our trading desk on how many starboard keyboards we each go through a year. Average seems to be about 3 per person! I did 5 last year, although one did get dirty and I just wanted a replacement hehe. Q/A must be terrible.
- swarnie_ 8y ago3 or more per person?? Any idea what these things costs? I can barely get a replacement iPhone each year.
- phyalow 8y agoNo idea, I think BBG just replaces them for free as part of a terminal subscription (~27k USD p/a per user).
- CompelTechnic 8y agoThe real reason they get broken so often- the temptation to obliterate a free, delicate artifact is pretty strong when you just make a losing trade to the tune of $2.4m.
- jnichols35 8y agoI have a stack of new ones next to my desk at work. It feels like not even a day goes by that I have to replace one. The typical culprit is coffee, otherwise the keys fall off with relative ease.
- fermienrico 8y agoI really love vintage computer design. Looking at these Bloomberg keyboards, although made for a high-end market, makes me wish we had good computer hardware today. Besides Apple/Microsoft/Thinkpads, I pretty much dislike every single piece of computer hardware out there. Oh, and I want to see an complete and utter cessation of RGB lighting in computer products.
- gaius 8y agoIf you want a high quality keyboard, get a Cherry http://cherry.de/cid/index.htm http://cherry.de/cid/index.htm
- dsr_ 8y agopckeyboard.com makes and sells the only buckling-spring keyboards on the market. They're missing a big plate of steel to make it weigh an extra pound, but they appear to be as reliable as the Model M that they are based on. No lighting available. PS/2 or USB, black or white-tan, with a pointing stick or without. Reasonably priced.
- dbuder 8y agoI'm interested in what you want in a keyboard. Do you want any lighting? If I kill scroll lock would you care? How heavy is too heavy? Do you want media keys? Can I change the numpad layout? Which enter key do you want?
- Bluestrike2 8y agoBesides my chair (a HM Embody whose price I still don't like thinking about), the most comfortable/enjoyable thing I've ever bought for my work was my first mechanical keyboard, a Vortex Pok3r 60% keyboard with a set of SA profile keycaps. A good keyboard makes a world of difference. At the moment, I'm actually in the middle of building a custom 65% keyboard. Just waiting on the PCB to arrive after the first one was damaged in transit. It's a bug. Once you get bit, you'll gladly jump down the keyboard rabbit hole.
- arianvanp 8y agoMy favourite trade floor keyboard I Own is definitely the Wey. Fully programmable. Swappable modules for Bloomberg and Reuters. Picked the thing up at a yard sale and recently locked myself out of the thing by accident https://youtu.be/e-5DDDd3Qzw https://youtu.be/e-5DDDd3Qzw
- ljoshua 8y agoWhat the what?? That is one of the most intense things I've seen in a while! Three full color screens on a keyboard... woah.
- Yetanfou 8y agoThat 1995 infrared keyboard seems to be exactly the same as the one used with the Virgin Webplayer [1], an internet appliance which Virgin peddled in the late 90's. I have a few of these around here, used one of them to create a solar-powered waterproof and possibly bullet-proof machine to take with me on a canoe expedition from Whitehorse to the Bering strait. Another one was used as a file server for about 6 years, yet another one as a remote camera monitoring terminal to keep watch over what happens in the barn. With 200 MHz of Cyrus MediaGX 'power' (comparable to a 125 MHz Pentium) it wasn't the fastest of machines but it still works for these purposes. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Webplayer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Webplayer
- scandox 8y agoLooking at the later keyboards reminds one how much common ground there is between traders and gamers....pscyhologically speaking.
- joebergeron 8y agoCan't help but think that the 1996 models look a bit like the old little toy Casio keyboards from back in the day, complete with tinny speakers protected by plastic grating. :-)
- unixhero 8y agoWhat a great review of the keyboards. This is such exquisite exotica in my view.
- cube00 8y agoSome of the early versions look like they were really trying to do some great innovation but disappointedly after all this time ended up at an IBM style keyboard that was around in the 80s.
- gaytards 8y agoi dont give a shit about this biased source.
- TimMurnaghan 8y agoBloomerg also use the keyboard as a "non-tariff barrier". As a systems integrator trying to work with their systems in the 90s they insisted that we buy a batch of a specific pantone gold colour for our keycaps. So for people looking for easier to use data sources - even with more modern data feeds they're heavily license restricted and there's a lot of proprietary lock-in.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- plg 8y agoA question about keyboards in general - don't you find that keyboards with numeric keypads are so wide, that the mouse has to sit at such a distance laterally, that it strains your wrist to use the mouse?
- sosuke 8y agoYou would find plenty of people who might argue that using the mouse would slow them down. I'm no keyboard purist but I do like an interface where I don't have to take my hands from the home keys. Also if you consider laptop keyboards the trackpad usually sits just south of the space bar keeping it nearer the hands.
- plg 8y agoThat's true I've heard some people say they basically never use the mouse. I wonder how feasible this is with MacOS in its current incarnation.
- gr3yh47 8y agounfortunately MacOS has a lot of keyboard shortcuts that are different depending on what application you're in (vs windows) also there's a lot of annoying little things - if i'm typing in one space, and switch spaces, my typing cursor is still off the screen until i bring an app in the current space in focus you can still do it, but there's a lot more context-specific stuff to be a keyboard poweruser on MacOS vs windows/linux
- rjsw 8y agoMy mouse is to the left of my keyboard, are there any right-handed programmers ?
- newguynewguy 8y agoNo, us righties just tape stuff from stack overflow together. I don't think that counts.
- 8y ago
- Yizahi 8y ago<offtopic> Anyone else finds their blog hideous? https://imgur.com/a/m8wtR1F https://imgur.com/a/m8wtR1F
- antjanus 8y agonot that part but their header disappearing and reappearing is annoying. I'm on a smallish laptop screen, scrolling up to look at a picture immediately results in less space to read and covering the photo I just scrolled up to see. So I have to scroll up to the photo, and then scroll down a little to make the header disappear.
- psychometry 8y agoWeird. On Chrome OS X the font looks properly anti-aliased.
- dmix 8y agoAnyone in the finance industry know why the keyboard would require speakers? Did the terminals use audio to deliver financial information or news reports?
- apaprocki 8y agoThe keyboards had speakers because at that time not many business PCs had speakers connected if they had soundcards. This provided a physical volume slider to listen to news out loud as well as a headphone/mic jack for private listening. Later uses allowed using the mic for squawkbox like functionality communicating between employees on various desks. The Terminal has had streaming audio and video since forever now. (Audio use cases involve things like earnings calls, investor relations as well as news.) Aside from A/V, the Terminal also has had text to speech for news for a very long time as well.
- alexeiz 8y ago2004 "Centerboard" and 2008 "Freeboard" were abominations. I don't know about traders but no self-respecting programmer at Bloomberg used these keyboard. Most replaced them with Microsoft Ergonomic or anything else to make typing bearable.