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Most exchanges run in an 'auction mode' for short periods of time (5-15 min) several times a day. Often at the end of the trading day to define the 'closing price'. During an auction bids and asks are accepted, but executed only when the auction changes. So it differs from your model only in two points:

1. 1. The execution time is known, so still speed sometimes may be useful if you want to modify your order just before the execution
2. 2. It is not enforced. And what would be to point of enforcing it to be 'the execution model' and banning other kinds of exchange?

Here you can find more details on how it is done on major European exchanges:

http://www.londonstockexchange.com/traders-and-brokers/rules-regulations/exchange-delivery-settlement-price.htm

http://www.eurexchange.com/trading/market_model/matching_principles/auction_principles_en.html

Now the cash market has become all electronic, yes the market place may exist in a building on the outskirts of Frankfurt, but the financial centre is no longer there. Much of the trading is actually taking place in London and Frankfurt becomes relegated to backoffice clearing and settlement operations.

What I'm trying to say is that whilst the market place is important, it could be quickly established elsewhere. Where the customers are becomes more important.

Essentiaally it means there is a movement towards a single financial centre serving a group of timezones.

The backend runs OpenVMS and the critical files are kept on solid-state disks. Originally DEC ESE20s. In particular, the order-books are kept on mirrored solid-state disks to allow for fast matching between buyer and seller.

Go to Eurex, for example. They are the largest electronic financial derivatives exchange in the world and their core systems run OpenVMS. SWIFT (the money transfer people) still do a lot with VMS as do many other people.

I have been looking at the problem of rewriting exchanges onto modern, cheaper hardware platforms with other operating systems. It really isn't easy.

The point is that with the drives that I have used (SCSI-U2W through fibre channel) is that they used good old fashioned interfaces which meant that they were plug compatible with older hardware.

This is why the largest electronic derivatives exchange in the world runs on VMS. Many other exchanges also use VMS. They do so for a reason, it takes on a bundle of work and doesn't die. If you have redundant hardware, it will stay up for ever, just failing over between hardware when it craps out.

Incidentally, Cutler started by writing RSX-11M then 11M+, a 16-bit operating system. He then went onto writing VMS and later the Digital PL/1 compiler before he left.

Digital got very little from MS apart from the promise to use their hardware platform for NT. The Windows API definitely has no relation to any of the APIs on VMS although some bits may be similar because of the former Digital engineers.

As the for command language, the original DOS/CPM commands derived from another 16-bit Digital operating system, RSTS/E. Both RSTS/E and M+ eventually started supporting Digital Command Language (DCL) which became fully developed under VMS (much like a Unix shell). The file types go back to the RSTS/E and RSX days.

The version numbers that you complain about are a feature of the VMS file system. They allow you to keep a few old versions of files around easily so you always have the possibility to revert to a previous version.

They memory manager is not particularly slow unless there is a high demand for memory and not enough physical memory available, and even Linux has problems there. The real issue of VMS as a platform is the overhead associated with process creation, now partly circumvented with threads.

A couple of years ago, I was being driven past independence square in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, a minute or so after we left the square, there was a tremendous explosion, shortly afterwards another. We arrived at our appointment in a government building to find it being evacuated just then another bomb went off by the headquarters of the National Bank, much further away, but it rattled the glass of the building we were visiting a couple of miles away. The National Bank was next to my hotel!

Coordinated bombings is one one of the hallmarks of Osama bin Laden and it was in an adjacent country (about five hours drive). It would not be surpising at allI lived and was uninjured, somebody a few minutes behind me was killed in their car by the blast on the square.

As one of the original porters of PGP and possibly almost a victim of Osama bin Laden (certainly of some Islamic fundementalist terrorists), I can better comment than most here.

Electronic intelligence gathering is a very good way of spending a lot of money, but it doesn't really work. Even if people do not use encryption, they can coordinate attacks using the personal columns.

Please remember that the sabotage attacks of the French resistance preceding D-day were co-ordinated using the BBC world service radio broadcasts! Terrorists can use personal columns

In the need we need human intelligance. Many of the persons best qualified to do this were born outside the US and have at least spent long periods of their lives travelling. These are not the regular people employed by the FBI or the CIA.

The alternative is that we bless these orgaisations with the master keys to our communications. And then watch whilst the people that the CIA and FBI do employ like Hansen sell it to whoever pays the most.

Phil gets upset about these things, please remember that he was also out in Nevada protesting against nuclear weapons testing.

Programs like PGP have helped aid organistaions tremendously, especially thouse concerned with human rights.

There were secret key programs before and after PGP, however what it did was more of an assistance to electronic commerce, i.e. solve the key distribution problem using public key encryption between two unrelated entities. Bin Laden's organisation is essentially one umbrella organisation, a bit like the Pentagon and this is a different world to where a program like PGP helps the most. Interestingly enough, GnuPGP forms the basis for encrypting and signing securities and cash transfer instructions now within Uzbekistan. I don't know whether it ever helped the terrorists there (I doubt it), but it certainly helps the economy. The countries that value it the most are those that have sufferred in the past from the most oppression.

Through a variety of means public key encryption has left the US. In any case, there are other schemes for authentication and privacy that come from outside the US. To bolt the door now will only harm the US commercially.

Ok, I've said my piece!!!!