[GreenKeys] 28 stock ticker?

[Jim Haynes]

On Tue, 30 Jul 2019, Peter Gottlieb wrote:
> Hook up to a microcomputer tied to the net and it could print out 
> selected stocks!
>
There's a story about that, that I've told before but maybe it bears
retelling.

Walt Zenner retired as V.P. of R&D at Teletype in 1964.  Soon after he
formed a company with Peter Mero, called Quotemaster Corp.

Peter Mero deserves his own place in history.  He was Hungarian, worked 
for ITT before WW-II, and during the war was communications director for 
the U.S. OSS.  Afterward he was in the U.S. and developed a machine called 
Electrowriter, similar to a Telautograph.  Walt did some moonlighting for 
Peter, since the Bell System was not interested in that kind of product.

Quotemaster was a machine that worked as a stock ticker with a type wheel.
It had a selection feature so the customer could select which stocks he
wanted to follow and the machine would print only those, instead of
hundreds of feet of paper for the entire market.  I have some amusing
pictures that were made for publicity.  One shows the president of 
TransLux holding in one hand a small roll of tape of interest and a huge
bale of tape of the entire market for the day.  Others show a housewife
right out of I Love Lucy, on the phone to her broker or maybe to a friend,
while sitting next to the Quotemaster machine in her kitchen or living
room.

Well TransLux bought the rights to the machine and the Quotemaster name
and planned to manufacture it.  But then the economy took a downturn and
the machines were never produced.  So the company had to find a new name
for itself and chose Extel.  Contrary to rumors Extel does not stand
for ex-Teletype, although Extel hired some people away from Teletype.
Rather there is an English company named Exchange Telegraph that serves 
the stock exchanges there and is popularly known as Ex Tel.

The story goes on to tell how Extel developed a dot-matrix printer and
found Reuters was interested in buying the product.  Reuters execs
visited the Extel factory near Chicago.  As the company had only five
employees, Mero hired eleven actors to populate the factory during
the visit.  About a quarter million printers were manufactured.

There was a continuing relationship with TransLux.  Jack Hart gave me an
electronic Telex terminal made by TransLux and patented by them, which
uses an Extel printer.

And all this was before microprocessors.