A history piece, not a product announcement: IEEE Spectrum's Past Forward column traces the Bloomberg Terminal from the 1982 Market Master — a monochrome CRT, hand-assembled "Chiclet" keyboard, and a dedicated phone line to a private hub — to today's software-based service at $32,000+/year. The useful technical details: IMS was founded in 1981 by Michael Bloomberg and three ex-Salomon colleagues after his $10 million equity payout. Merrill Lynch put in $30 million for a 30 percent stake and exclusivity, waived in 1984. The first 22 terminals shipped into a global recession, which happened to coincide with floating interest rates and the move to electronic trading. Since there was no commercial internet, Bloomberg built a closed network with centralized compute; the keyboard did color-coded finance-specific hot keys, gained a trackball in 1990, a speaker and phone jacks in 1992, 23 languages by 1996, and a fingerprint reader in the early 2000s. Leasing of dedicated hardware ended in 2000. The kicker: the Smithsonian has Bond King Bill Gross's keyboard, login and password taped to the front. Forty years of proprietary network engineering, defeated by a Post-it.