Evolution of a 21st Century Market Data

Once upon a time, terminals connected to mainframes. Market data went into the mainframe and came out of the mainframe. Simple. Then market data went into screens via video switches. It was a television broadcast on cable. Not a big deal now, but mind-blowing in 1980. After that came PCs and the ability to distribute data to a PC, based on user-specific requests. The Market Data System was a natural development from here, using a network to deliver the data to a large number of PCs (consumers). At last, users had a mature, sophisticated delivery system that could take in data and distribute it intelligently to different locations all round the organization. This remains the model we have today, but it now has to handle much more data and many different types of data. You need to be able to efficiently distribute data from an increasing number of sources, while normalizing the data to maximize its usefulness. Fortunately, the technology has kept pace.