[GreenKeys] 28 stock ticker?

[Andy KN4UCL]

Fascinating thread guys.

> On Jul 30, 2019, at 11:08 PM, Jim Haynes <jhhaynes at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> ______________________________________________________________
> GreenKeys mailing list
> Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/greenkeys
> Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm
> Post: mailto:GreenKeys at mailman.qth.net
> 
> 2002-to-present greenkeys archive: http://mailman.qth.net/pipermail/greenkeys/
> 1998-to-2001 greenkeys archive: http://mailman.qth.net/archive/greenkeys/greenkeys.html
> Randy Guttery's 2001-to-2009 GreenKeys Search Tool: http://comcents.com/tty/greenkeyssearch.html
> 
> This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net
> Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
> Message delivered to kn4ucl at gmail.com