One bank's brilliant upgrade was another bank's crash
who, me? Monday again? It seems like only yesterday it was Sunday. Oh well, that means it's time to kick off the working week with a dose of Who, Me? – The Reg's weekly confessional, where readers share tales of tech mischief and misadventure.
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Nick" whose career in finance once had him working for "a large US bank in the City" (for non-UK readers, that means the financial district in London).
One of his functions was keeping an eye on market data, which was sent out regularly by services like Reuters among others. These were early days, so the system was not all high-res and fancy like it is now. Users would type into an X-terminal, and Reuters would send its reports in a standard format: 64 columns by 17 rows.
Most importantly, all the banks' systems were standardized on that format, so that as data was sent out everyone could read it with no issues of formatting. You would enter a code for a particular company – say, BP for British Petroleum – and up would come the latest info that the markets might need to know. Not a lot of information fit in a page, but it was functional.
