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What are Those Tablet PCs that Stock Traders Use?

Posted by Cliff on from the where-can-I-get-one-of-these dept.

Crash McBang asks: "Watching CNBC, I notice that shots of the NYSE trading floor show traders scribbling madly on what appear to be wireless tablet PCs. So what kind of hardware is this, and what are they scribbling?" I've been wait for tablet PCs for a long, LONG time. Hopefully they will be hitting the home market soon because they would be much more ideal for portable tasks where even laptops proove bulky and uncomfortble.

1 of 23 comments (clear)

  1. We used these in the Navy by whoda · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I was on a submarine, and we had these PC-tablets for some testing.
    They were made to replace the standard log-books that the Quartermasters used for the ships logs.

    I can't remember the manufacturer, but, there was a monochrome LCD, which attached to a small laptop like computer.

    There was a pen-like stylus which you could use on the screen to select and highlight items. Finger pressure didn't make it work.

    The screen swiveled and latched to make it look like it was a 'tablet' PC, BUT, you could re-orientate it, because there was a keyboard underneath.

    We had custom software developed by Johns Hopkins(Pretty sure it was them). It ran Microsoft Windows for Pen computing.

    The software we had was basically a break down of ships functions. You selected the items as necessary, and then it produced a 'log-book' entry, dated/timed, and stored it on a removable hard disk-drive that was classified, and I 'think' was also soft-encrypted. By 'soft', I mean we didn't have to load our actual crypto tapes into it daily. It was some sort of hardware encryption.

    At the end of patrol, these disk drives would be sent in with the rest of the logs.

    It was a very robust system, we had crashes, and goof-ups, but somehow, we never lost a log entry.
    If it died, we were told to put in one of the other disks, and that all the data was recoverable. And much to our astonishment, it was.

    We were using these back in 1995-6, and I'm not in anymore, so I can't give better details than this.

    OH YES, I did forget. The Microsoft Windows for Pen computing had Solitaire included, so you could look like you were standing an alert watch, but really be screwing off!