Stock Ticker software early 80's and before

How serendipitous! I just finished whipping together a stock ticker application for my company to demo at CES. I had a short lead time and was putting it together in VB, so my options were limited. I had some nice DirectX stock ticker code that absolutely throttled the machine, making simultaneous data capture of the stock info impossible. As I was flipping through an old copy of Commodore Gazzette magazine before going to sleep ( :), I found a nice algorithm to do a stock ticker in basic by continuously LEFT$ and MID$ shifting through a string, character by character. Worked like a charm! Thanks, "Outdated" computer platform magazines! ----- Original Message ----- From: Jim Keohane To: cctech(a)classiccmp.org ; cctalk(a)classiccmp.org Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2003 10:43 PM Subject: Stock Ticker software early 80's and before There were software products, often with required peripherals (satellite, FM broadcast, leased line, etc.), that allowed an Apple ][ or TRS-80 or IBM PC, etc. to access stock or commodity ticker feeds in a real-time manner and monitor trades for price, volume and other limits. If activity was outside specified range the user would receive an alert like a screen/printer message or an audible beep or both. Some products were Radio Data Retriever, Intra-Day Analyst, PC Quote, etc. I am looking for documentation, news articles, manuals, reviews, ads, user guides, brochures, etc. describing such products. Not limited to micros either. There was a MERLIN stock market database and timesharing service with such abilities on Burroughs mainframes plus other systems on proprietary terminal networks (Quotron, Bloomberg, Instinet, etc.) that may have such abilities too. Even brokergae firms must have had software with such abilities inhouse on mainframes and other systems. If you can point me to any docs reflecting state-of-the-art around mid '83 and earlier please let me know via jimkeo(a)multi-platforms.com. Thanks! - Jim Jim Keohane, Multi-Platforms, Inc. "It's not whether you win or lose. It's whether you win!"