Here's how Wall Street traded before Bloomberg terminals were everything

EliteTrader

Early Friday, Bloomberg LP experienced a "significant" unexplained outage of its terminals.

With the Bloomberg terminal outage, traders were forced to pick up the phone and do it the old fashioned way.

Complimentary Tech Event

Transform talent with learning that works

Capability development is critical for businesses who want to push the envelope of innovation.Discover how business leaders are strategizing around building talent capabilities and empowering employee transformation.Know More

A Bloomberg Terminal is a must-have machine for traders. They use them to message others, obtain real-time market data, news, and stock quotes among many other functions.

Wall Street is pretty much spoiled by the incredible $20,000-per-year machine.

Before broadband fired live quotes and analysis at the speed of light to our smartphones, traders used to read bid-ask spreads off of chalkboards and historical data off of miles of ticker tape.

We went way back to see how trading was done in the pre-Bloomberg terminal era. We even went back before ticker tape was a thing.

With the help of images from the Museum of American Finance in New York, we put together a brief, visual history of trading technology, from ticker tape to the present.

Editor's Note: Former Business Insider writer Rob Wile contributed to the original version of this feature.