A Brief History of the Bloomberg Terminal

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Allison Marsh recounts how Michael Bloomberg’s 1982 Market Master for Merrill Lynch became the Bloomberg Terminal and later a software-and-news platform. She covers the Chiclet keyboard, private network, Instant Bloomberg chat, and museum keyboards that once signaled desk-bound market power.

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• Bloomberg entered a crowded market with integrated analysis. After leaving Salomon Brothers, Innovative Market Systems sold a dedicated terminal that combined live data with historical calculations instead of leaving traders to phone calls, print sheets, and separate news feeds.
• Merrill Lynch bankrolled the first machines. The firm invested about $30 million for a 30 percent stake and five years of exclusivity, then waived exclusivity in 1984 after the first 22 Market Master terminals arrived in 1982 amid floating rates and electronic trading.
• The keyboard was the product surface. Color-coded finance hot keys, later a trackball, speaker, and multilingual layouts sat on a closed network that ran most computation at company hubs before public internet access.
• News and apps outgrew leased hardware. Bloomberg built its own newsroom in 1990, launched Open Bloomberg software on customer PCs in 1995, stopped leasing dedicated terminals around 2000, and now sells an integrated environment for roughly $32,000 a year.
• Surplus keyboards became museum objects. Smithsonian pieces, including Bill Gross’s keyboard with login credentials taped on the front, preserve the terminal’s status as a physical emblem of market work.

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