Stock trading kind of skyrocketed in the late 1960s. It got to the point where the NYSE had to close on Wednesdays just to catch up with the all the trading pa

Stock trading kind of skyrocketed in the late 1960s. It got to the point where the NYSE had to close on Wednesdays just to catch up with the all the trading paperwork from Monday and Tuesday (Thursday and Friday was handled over the weekend). This led to brokerages buying computers to start to manage everything, just in time for trading volume to crash around 1970 and brokerages going bankrupt left and right because of all the computer investments they made. Would you be surprised to learn that the exchanges switched to using dollars and cents for quotes and trades only in the 1990s? Prior to that it was dollars and fractions of a dollar (like 1/8, 1/32, etc). Strangely enough, all the fractions used were powers of two and thus could be represented exactly in binary. Now that we use dollars and cents, you don’t get IEEE754 floating point representations for all trades. Progress!