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Section 6.4 Market Data Technology: From Ticker to Consolidated Tape
Page 220: According to the Waters Hall of Fame, in 1963, Robert Sinn, the founder of Ultronics, introduced the StockMaster system -- "a device on which quotations were retrieved by pressing buttons on a machine and displayed as three digits." Mr. Sinn is currently writing "the real story of stock quotation systems in the early 60’s." (Thanks to Robert Sinn)
Mr. Sinn has been gracious enough to allow us to post a preliminary version of his paper, "Reminiscences of a Stock Quotation System: The Real Story of Ultronic Systems Corporation" (submitted to the IEEE).
Section 2.2 Numbers and Prices
Page 49: Only the oldest Sumerian tablets (3000 BCE) used the circle “o” or “O” as a number (denoting 1 or 10); later Sumerian and Accadic tablets used a vertical line | to represent the number 1. (Thanks to H. Guggenheimer)
Section 2.3. Time Is Money: Loans and Interest
Page 51: The transliteration of the Sumerian unit of weight has been variously rendered in English as m’na, manū, manē, mina, mine. The macron (the small bar over the vowels) indicates a long sound; note that the HTML display of the macron requires UTF-8 (8-bit Unicode Transformation Format) character encoding. Nemat-Nejat in Cuneiform Mathematical Texts As a Reflection of Everyday Life in Mesopotamia (reference [0.2] in Chapter 2) renders it as the bold hyphenated ma-na (e.g., see page 59 in [0.2] for her discussion of VAT 8528). My rendering with the double n is not standard although I think it is more readable. (Thanks to H. Guggenheimer)
Section 2.4. Days, Months, and Years
Page 61: The reference to the Julian Calendar as being established by “Emperor Julian (46 BCE)” should have read “Emperor Julius (46 BCE)” -- as in Julius Caesar (100-44 BCE). Among Julius’ titles were Pater Patriae (Father of the Fatherland), Dictator Perpetuus (Perpetual Dictator), and Pontifex Maximus (Highest Priest) -- a role which allowed him to set the calendar. Julius' calendar was based on the work of Alexandrian (Greek) mathematicians. Two years after his assassination he was given the title Divus (god) and the name Caesar (probably pronounced “Kai-Sar”) was used to designate Roman Emperors (so technically Julius Caesar was not an Emperor even though paradoxically his adopted son was). See Suetonius (75-130 CE), The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars XL. (Thanks to H. Guggenheimer)