CORE DUMP

Chase Manhattan Bank has made recommendations to senior management following its evaluations of hardware and software to support 800 trading room positions in New York and London. Project head Bill Schimoler says a final decision is due sometime in July.

Lately departed Digital Equipment Corp. Banking/Investments chief Norm Goldberg has taken a position with a major money center bank, sources say. Which one couldn't be determined at press time.

Steven Daffron, now senior vice president of strategic planning and information services at the New York Mercantile Exchange, is joining Goldman Sachs & Co. as vice president planning and development. "There will be an information services group reporting to him" in his new role at Goldman, a Nymex spokesperson says. Daffron, who headed Nymex's efforts to build and launch the Access electronic futures and options matching system, will stay at the exchange until mid-July, well after the slated June 24 Access launch. The spokesperson says his departure won't affect the project. "The Access department will remain the same," she notes. Nymex hasn't named a replacement yet. There probably will be a new senior vice president named, but "it would not necessarily be a direct correlation," the spokesperson says.

Most of the hardware for Citicorp's new trading room in New York is rolled out, sources say, and is scheduled to go live in early August. The 450-seat Micrognosis-supported room includes lots of legacy systems from the old room, as well as the new systems. Workstations from Sun Microsystems Inc., Digital Equipment Corp., NeXT Computer Inc. and Apple Computer Inc. sit cheek by jowl. One source -- half jokingly -- says there are almost as many old boxes in the equipment room as there are new ones.

Sources say that Morgan Stanley & Co.'s cadre of high-tech trading room technologists has developed a couple of proprietary programming languages called A+ and A++. While details are scarce, sources say the languages are object-oriented versions of APL -- the programming language upon which Morgan built all its famous black box systems of yore. Incidentally, the inventor of APL is the father of long-time Morgan technology executive Keith Iverson.

Systems-management software vendor Tivoli Systems Inc. -- a company that's been barking up a lot of Wall Street's trading technology trees of late -- has announced a deal to develop products running on Microsoft Corp.'s new Windows NT. Previously, Tivoli's products were all UNIX.

Co-Cam Computer Group of Melbourne, Australia, announced that it has found a new marketing partner in FD Consulting Inc. Under the deal, Co-Cam will market FD's digital data feed-handling system, known as Real-Time MIPS, in the Far East. Co-Cam maintains a family of financial services systems called Trinity.

Renaissance Software Inc.'s director of marketing and product development Shirsh Hardikar has left his full-time job. He'll continue to serve as a consultant to the vendor. Meanwhile, Renaissance has hired Peter Lomax as its London-based European sales manager. He was previously at Boston Treasury Systems and, before, that, at Telerate. Lomax joins Alan Raillton, who was lately recruited to run Renaissance's U.K. operations.

Correction: The Chicago Mercantile Exchange announced a record- breaking sale price of $182,000 for an Index and Option Market membership. May 31 TST attributed that price to a full Merc membership -- which costs more in the neighborhood of half a mil. Sorry to disappoint the bargain hunters.

By now you've probably noticed that TST has redesigned its front page. Our goal was to make things look a little more streamlined -- but without jarring the traditionalists we know lurk among our long-time readers. (Goodness knows, people in the trading room technology business have enough change to deal with without us spinning your heads around, too.) We hope you like it.