Bloomberg Terminal

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The Bloomberg Terminal is a computer system that enables financial professionals to monitor real-time financial market movement and trades. Most large financial organisations have subscriptions to the Bloomberg service, which costs between $1,750 and $2,100 per terminal per month. It is owned by Bloomberg L.P. (founded by the current Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg) and is considered one of the leading service providers in its field.

The Terminal is 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 usually a Windows or Web Application. The server side of The Terminal has been developed using mostly FORTRAN and C programming languages. Each server machine runs multiple instances of the server process. By utilizing a form of a context switch the servers keep track of the state of each End User, allowing user interaction to be handled by different server processes. The Terminal maintains a high level of performance by using a proprietary non-relational database system. The GUI is also proprietary and takes a while to get used to.

Leading competitors for electronic financial data provision include Thomson Corporation, Reuters, FactSet Research Systems, and Dow Jones.