New Technology At Rich, Inc: Real-Time Spreadsheet, Unix Emulation Of Art Interface

While Rich, Inc. has installed its new Triarch digital trading room system at fewer than a dozen sites, the company is plunging ahead with development of tools and operating environments to take advantage of the digital habitat. These include a real-time spreadsheet designed for fixed-income traders, a Unix emulation of the Advanced Reuter Terminal user interface, and a touch-screen system for creating composite pages.

And, for the ultimate power user, Intel is building for Rich and Reuters an "IDN Server" which will maintain an online database -- in RAM -- of real-time prices for every exchange-traded instrument in the world. The box will be controlled by an 80386 processor and contain 128 Megabytes of RAM.

Reuters has settled on the Microsoft Windows ART display as its principal user interface for future applications (MTR, June 1986). The problem in the trading room is that ART runs under MS-DOS, while Rich's Triarch runs under Unix. While a DOS machine can be hooked to the Triarch Ethernet LAN, the whole idea behind digital is to get rid of all those special-purpose tubes.

One possible solution under study at Rich is to use a brand new programming language called "Actor" to port the ART interface to Unix. Actor is an object-oriented language derived from Smalltalk and developed by Evanston, IL-based Whitewater Associates. Actor currently runs under Windows, says Bill Bliss at Whitewater, but the company is negotiating with Rich for a Unix version, which would ostensibly allow the ART interface to appear on every screen in a trading room.

As Lotus Development Corp. has discovered (story, above) real-time market data and off-the-shelf spreadsheets are a clunky couple. The difficulty arises because spreadsheets need to recalculate every time a data element is updated. If new data arrives during the recalculation, however, there is a collision, the data is lost, or some other unwanted effect prevails.

Rich's new spreadsheet, which will go into beta test at a Security Pacific trading room in April, is an attempt to overcome this drawback. Rich bought source code rights to Q-Calc, an off- the-shelf Unix spreadsheet with a Lotus-like interface, and modified the code to make it more compatible with real-time applications. Specifically, only the row and column -- not the entire spreadsheet -- are recalculated when updates arrive. If additional data appears while recalculation is in progress, the calculation is suspended momentarily while the incoming data is dealt with.

The spreadsheet also incorporates several Monroe Bond Trader functions. One simple application using digital feeds from two government securities brokers, RMJ and Garban, compares yields of different instruments at both spreads and flags the better deal.

Current Triarch installations allow traders to create composite pages from different feeds using keystrokes. However, Rich is developing a system to provide the same capability using a touch screen.

The first color Triarch is set for installation soon at the London trading room of the Royal Bank of Canada. The beta test of the new Rich "ticker generator" (MTR, November 1986) will begin soon at Chicago Research and Trading.