March 17, 2012 04:45 am EDT

Universal ticker hack takes a look back at a time before NASDAQ (video)

Know what takes the sting out of your crashing stock portfolio? Arduino fun, silly geeks. Alright, so in this case it's an FTDI Basic board, but the spirit of this hack remains the same. A Swarthmore student by the name of Ames Bielenberg picked up where his hobbyist Pops left off and cooked up a Spring Break scheme to reanimate a late 19th century Universal Ticker. What's that, you ask? Only an old timey way of printing out pulses of what those monthly dividends were going to look like. So, while other youngins were going six shots deep, our enterprising tinkerer blacked out the windows, forgot about the bikinis and gently transformed this rare relic (of which there are only 6,000) into a Mac accessory. Using that above mentioned circuitry, lightly modified to accommodate RTS output and sufficient power demands, and the addition of a simple python script to translate that fluctuating index into real-time ticks, Ames was able to breath new life into an antiquated piece of Americana. Hop on past the break for a video demo of this tech walk down memory lane.

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Universal ticker hack takes a look back at a time before NASDAQ (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 17 Mar 2012 00:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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