- Bloomberg Terminal
professionals to access the Bloomberg Professional service through which users can monitor and analyze real-time financial market data movements and place trades. The system also provides news, price quotes, and messaging across its proprietary secure network. Most large financial firms have subscriptions to the Bloomberg service, which costs $1,500 to $1,800 per terminal per month (as of 2007). [ [http://about.bloomberg.com/contactus/factsheets/profservice.pdf Mayor Michael R ] ] Many exchanges charge their own additional fees for access to real time price feeds across the terminal. The same applies to various news organizations.
Architecture
The terminal implements a client-server architecture with the server running on a multiprocessor UNIX platform. The client, used by the end users to interact with the system is a Windows application. End users can also make use of an extra service ("Bloomberg Anywhere ℠") that allows Web access to this Windows application via a
Citrix client. There is also a WAP portal,BlackBerry application, Windows Mobile application, and iPhone application to allow mobile access. The server side of the terminal has been developed using mostly theFortran and C programming languages. Recent years have seen a shift in focus towards C++, and an embedded scripting engine on both client and server side. Fact|date=March 2008 Each server machine runs multiple instances of the server process. Using a proprietary form of a context switching the servers keep track of the state of each end user, allowing user interaction to be handled by different server processes. TheGraphical User Interface (GUI ) code is also proprietary.Bloomberg Keyboard
Although the look and feel of the Bloomberg keyboard is very similar to the standard computer keyboard, there are several enhancements that help a user navigate through the system. Keys on the keyboard are always referred to inside angle brackets, and owing to the fact that the system pre-dates the standardization of the IBM keyboard in the mid 1980's, a number of standard PC keys have non-standard names. For example, the "Esc" key now common to all keyboards is referred to as
in the Bloomberg system, and the "Enter" key is always referred to as . Crucially, the Bloomberg keyboard includes a unique
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