CORE DUMP

From Nasa With Love: Clips

The real rocket scientists down at NASA's Johnson Space Center have been hard at work delivering a little-known 'payload' of the space race: CLIPS. CLIPS -- C Language Interactive Production System -- is development environment at the core of all NASA's fielded expert systems.

NASA is popular stop on the underground career railway between Wall Street's quantitative research bunkers and mathematical talent pools at Stanford Univ., U.C. Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT. It's only natural that CLIPS should find its way to Wall Street.

CLIPS runs the lion's share of the source code used by ART -- Inference Corp.'s Automated Reasoning Tool. But unlike ART, CLIPS resides in public domain.

ART purchasers can expect to pay in the neighborhood of $65,000 for the popular development tool. Fully documented copy of CLIPS is available at staggering low price: $200.

Sun's Invisible Workstation

Sun executives have persistently denied existence of new family of workstations -- code-named Roadrunner -- aimed at trading systems market. Sources at more than one investment bank indicate the new workstation is being shipped for beta test.

The Roadrunner is reported to include an Intel 386 processor (!), and support multiple monitors. With clock speed approaching 24 mHz, and performance ranging from 2.5 to 6 MIPs, depending on model selected, Roadrunner will reportedly run DOS applications in native mode.

Picture is admittedly fuzzy, but may portend release of Sun product designed to woo trading room managers away from the multiple screen consoles supplied by mainstream systems integrators.

Telerate To Announce New MBS Data

Telerate will shortly announce major new product for mortgage- backed securities trading, according to a source close to the New York based market data vendor.

The MBS product results from exclusive relationship with major MBS broker and is intended to do for mortgage securities market what Telerate's Cantor Fitzgerald page did for treasuries.

Presumably through cooperation of broker, new MBS product will provide viewer with ability to hit bids and make offers.