OT: Re: Keyboard actuator

From: Chris Kennedy <chris_at_mainecoon.com>
Date: Wed May 10 16:54:48 2000

John Foust wrote:
>
> At 01:08 PM 5/10/00 -0700, Fred Cisin (XenoSoft) wrote:
> >This is THE device that will transfer files to ANYTHING. IF you can stop
> >laughing.
>
> Sounds like fun. How could it come close to hitting any key on any
> keyboard? Are the solenoids positionable?

This hits a little too close to home.

Back in '90 I was involved with a project which had to interface
to the Tokyo Stock Exchange. As it turned out there were multiple
means of introducing trades into the TSE, all a function of the
instrument in question. These consisted of:

- Something not completely unlike bisync on a 56K line that could
  only be used for a handful of instruments.

- A system which required writing 5'4" 360K floppies using a
  proprietary disk format which were then hand carried from
  the writing station to a separate reader where the trades were
  snarfed off and uploaded to the TSE (again, for a small universe
  of instruments)

- An async dialup system which one was absolutly prohibited from
  connecting to anything other than an approved terminal.
  Naturally this was the system that was used to both input and
  capture the vast majority of trades. To make things worse, the
  TSE employed a small army of auditors who would make surprise
  inspections to assure that you hadn't contaminated their pristine
  dial-up lines with your own equipment.

As a consequence of this, most trading floors included a bizarre
piece of hardware which -- you guessed it -- hammered the
keyboard with solenoid actuated fingers along with (then
quite pricy) OCR hardware to make sense of the stuff being puked
back by the exchange.

When I first saw all of this stuff I thought it was one of the
funniest things I'd ever seen. It was when I realized that it
was up to my team to make it work that depression set in...

-- 
Chris Kennedy
chris_at_mainecoon.com
http://www.mainecoon.com
PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685  6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97
Received on Wed May 10 2000 - 16:54:48 BST

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