Quotron Unveils 'Open Windows' Product Line: First Q1000 Support For Personal Computer Applications

After hemming and hawing for years, Quotron Systems, Inc. has finally released a product line meant to support personal computers in the Q1000 environment. With the Open Windows family of Microsoft Windows-based products, Quotron is bending to its clients' wishes for more connectivity between the Q1000 and the wide world of DOS.

But Quotron's first step into the domain of PC support has been carefully measured. The Open Windows line runs only on 80286/386 machines, meaning it can't be used effectively on most of the installed base of older machines at customer offices. And Quotron is giving its customers just barely enough data to support a set of basic applications, but hardly enough to threaten its core business -- leasing terminals and selling terminal-based services.

The Open Windows product line was introduced at a September 27th press conference in New York led by Quotron sales and marketing chief David Boyle. The family has three members: Quotdata, which maintains a PC-resident database of real-time and historical prices, Quotchart, a charting and technical analysis package, and Quotterm, a Q1000 terminal emulator. All three were crafted for Quotron by New York-based Inmark Development Corp.

Quotdata is the first production implementation of Quotron's long- promised selective data feed between the Q1000 processor and the DOS workstation. The user can maintain a PC-resident database of last sale, net change, volume, and time on up to 200 symbols, with updates automatically routed to the PC by the Q1000. Bids and offers aren't available.

Quotdata supports the MS-Windows Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) protocol, which allows data to be piped to other applications, including the Excel spreadsheet and third-party Windows applications like Multex. It also archives tick-by-tick data as received for a user-selected interval of days. Quotdata is priced at $250/month.

Quotchart is an updated version of Inmark's now-discontinued "Market Maker" software (MTR, February 1987). It provides the set of facilities required by a journeyman chartist, with the exception of CBOT Market Profile, and supports up to eight charts on each of two pages simultaneously. Quotchart is priced at $300/month.

Quotterm provides Q1000 terminal emulation and includes the ability to add color to the A-Page and to control certain functions by clicking the mouse. Until now, terminal emulation has been the only PC facility offered by Quotron. About 1,500 of its 40,000 or so Q1000 screens are PCs emulating terminals, the company says. Quotterm is priced at $100/month.

Quotdata is unquestionably a work-in-progress. During the press conference demo -- using live data -- a mouse malfunction led to a warm boot, which resulted in several minutes' worth of missing ticks on the Quotchart graphics. Quotron officials conceded that the current version provides no facility to retrieve the missing ticks, but that a future version will. Presumably other awkward features, like a requirement that the PC be kept on Eastern time, will also be upgraded in due course.