Early Friday, Bloomberg LP experienced a "significant" unexplained outage of its terminals.

With the Bloomberg terminal outage, traders were forced to pick up the phone and do it the old fashioned way.

A Bloomberg Terminal is a must-have machine for traders. They use them to message others, obtain real-time market data, news, and stock quotes among many other functions.

Wall Street is pretty much spoiled by the incredible $20,000-per-year machine.

Before broadband fired live quotes and analysis at the speed of light to our smartphones, traders used to read bid-ask spreads off of chalkboards and historical data off of miles of ticker tape.

We went way back to see how trading was done in the pre-Bloomberg terminal era. We even went back before ticker tape was a thing.

With the help of images from the Museum of American Finance in New York, we put together a brief, visual history of trading technology, from ticker tape to the present.

Editor's Note: Former Business Insider writer Rob Wile contributed to the original version of this feature.

