OT: Re: Keyboard actuator

John Foust wrote: This hits a little too close to home. Back in '90 I was involved with a project which had to interface to the Tokyo Stock Exchange. As it turned out there were multiple means of introducing trades into the TSE, all a function of the instrument in question. These consisted of: - Something not completely unlike bisync on a 56K line that could only be used for a handful of instruments. - A system which required writing 5'4" 360K floppies using a proprietary disk format which were then hand carried from the writing station to a separate reader where the trades were snarfed off and uploaded to the TSE (again, for a small universe of instruments) - An async dialup system which one was absolutly prohibited from connecting to anything other than an approved terminal. Naturally this was the system that was used to both input and capture the vast majority of trades. To make things worse, the TSE employed a small army of auditors who would make surprise inspections to assure that you hadn't contaminated their pristine dial-up lines with your own equipment. As a consequence of this, most trading floors included a bizarre piece of hardware which -- you guessed it -- hammered the keyboard with solenoid actuated fingers along with (then quite pricy) OCR hardware to make sense of the stuff being puked back by the exchange. When I first saw all of this stuff I thought it was one of the funniest things I'd ever seen. It was when I realized that it was up to my team to make it work that depression set in... -- Chris Kennedy chris(a)mainecoon.com http://www.mainecoon.com PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97