NeXT
Veteran Member
As long as the markets have existed there have been multiple ways to try and remain connected to it while at home or on the go. This resulted in the development in the QuoTrek.
Originally advertised in 1983 by a Bay Area company named Dataspeed the handheld devices began shipping not long after in March 1984. Dataspeed would operate a datacenter in Burlingame, California which would accumulate real-time and after-hours information on over 20000 market listed stocks and encode it into a perpetually looping stream of serial data that could be efficiently pushed to receivers. This data was then sent either by satellite or by leased lines to remote cities where it would then be transmitted 24 hours a day to the handhelds at up to 9600bps. Rather than develop hardware for its own frequency, Dataspeed instead had the data be sent to the FM transmitter of a major local radio station and placed into the often unused FM sideband for that station. As a result, Dataspeed did not need to deal with the operation and maintenance of numerous transmitters scattered throughout the United States and offered a 40+ mile range.
Initial launches took place in what I would call ”The Usual Suspects”: New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. A handheld could be purchased for around $400 but could also be leased or rented. Access to the service was restricted by device serial number via a monthly subscription of about $45-$60. A handheld could be programmed by the user to capture and display the information of up to 100 stocks and also included support for audible notifications for high/low market conditions and one-way messages. (such as for notifications of subscription renewal) Dataspeed from the start also planned to expand the service to include weather, travel and news information. Ultimately the service would be deployed to a dozen major cities throughout the United States with more planned as the platform continued to sell. The product was marketed in magazines and even landed a spot on The Computer chronicles in 1986.
Dataspeed hoped to sell at least 10000 units to make the product successful, officially. Unfortunately, they would begin to plateau around 2000 and within the year Dataspeed was nearly out of cash. QuoTrek would be sold as a wireless information service to Lotus (yes, the spreadsheet company), then in 1989 would be sold again to the Financial News Network before finally becoming part of the Data Broadcast Corporation by 1991 when FNN went bust. Interestingly enough this would at no time mean the end to the service. Possibly as a plan B, an additional external box (and later an internal ISA card) called Modio would be marketed that would receive the same stream of data being broadcast for the QuoTrek and feed it into your computer of choice. Since the subscription cost was still quite low compared to leaving a telephone line connected via modem 12 or even 24 hours a day the service continued to make financial sense and Modio along with the required subscription sold extremely well. The service would continue through the 90’s under the name Signal and by 1996/1997 sales and service on the QuoTrek handhelds would end and the sideband broadcasts would slowly be shutdown as the millennium approached. I can find an archived forum post from 2003 where someone asked if the service was even available (when questioning why someone was trying to fleece a QuoTrek in 2003 for $150), to which another user replied that all that was left was New York, with it too shutting down and ending the service for good in 2004.
From then on it’s clear that Internet and Cellular Data based systems were the successor and the obsolete QuoTrek fell into relative obscurity to the new generation of brokers, traders and savvy businessmen.
Signal, somehow continues on to this very day under the name eSignal.
I first heard of the Quotrek in an old issue of Popular Science, dated May 1984. ( https://books.google.ca/books?id=lg...ce=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false ) That was about 20 years ago when Google was still in its infancy and searching up obsolete products as such with just a vague name was still a mild practice in how patient you could be going through pages of results which were not autogenerated clickbait schlock. Never found one however until many years later when one surfaced on ebay for $20usd. With nothing to lose and nobody else expressing interest in a receiver for a long-dead service I pulled the trigger on it and a separate listing for the charging adapter and a Lotus branded 9v DC adapter.
The handheld arrived in a very clean and soft simulated leather pouch that when flipped open revealed a windowed pocket for a business card and the pouch holding the handheld. The handheld while smaller than a Cybiko handheld communicator felt considerably less cheap. It was nice and weighty, the plastics had a quality feel to them and the finish felt very refined. A large non-backlit LCD screen with multi-function buttons, a very strange On/Off power switch and an extendible and surprisingly long antenna were standard.
Internally it was advertised to use a rechargeable battery, to which I concerningly noticed there was no door to access the battery so I feared the worst for cells that were likely more than 30 years old. The handheld hides the four screws under the four rubber feet and the back easily separates, revealing that the battery had only begun to leak and the leakage was minimal enough to be brushed off.
The heart of the handheld is a Motorola 68HC11 MCU. A custom chip from Oki marked “Gate Array2”, from which the piezo beeper was stuck on top handles the supporting glue and an EPROM stores the firmware and likely the device serial number. Above the void for the four half-size 1.2v gumstick batteries is the sealed and soldered RF module that is the FM receiver. Slightly below that is a 2.5mm jack, for which I am not sure what it’s used for.
The base of the handheld has gold plated pads which would connect to accessories, such as the charger. Those would arrive shortly after from our other seller in Northern California. Immediately I noticed both the charger and adapter were quite dirty and when assembled and attached to the QuoTrek it emitted a strange 60hz buzz and the screen randomly activated with garbage. Okay something’s wrong.
As it turned out, both the adapter and the power supply had been through a flood and while from the photo the damage looks quite bad the only fatalities was a 1000uf 10v lytic capacitor inside the AC adapter which was so dead it had fallen off the board and the red charge LED in the adapter, which I replaced with a green LED. Once that was cleaned up I was getting a nice DC output with no insane ripple but the QuoTrek still would not turn on. It seems like a lot of devices this was expecting a good battery in order to work at all.
Since I wasn’t about to source new batteries yet I instead snipped the leads and attached my regulated bench supply. At 5v I slid the switch to ON and it beeped, filled the screen and then greeted me with a READY prompt.
From here however we cannot do much else beyond navigate through the various settings. With no FM signal to receive and no subscription, stock information is permanently unavailable and with the battery long perished whatever was last stored in the handheld’s memory was lost. Interestingly though with the unit now functional I could see the other various indicators hidden on the LCD and among them was what implied was a mode for use with a modem.
As there was another three pins unused on the base of the handheld I could only suspect that an additional data interface, presumably serial, either for dialing a service by telephone or to send orders rather than receive them was possible.
This is all more or a less a mystery as I did not receive with it any documentation covering the various features or options as well as a better idea on how to operate the QuoTrek. Similarly, all information on the SIGNAL receiver seems to of faded with time as have many of their users in its final years. While now officially a paperweight I find it to be a curious step into the world of market trading technology and wonder if one day the likely analog and unencrypted data it would have received may be reverse-engineered for the sake of fun. Not my cup of tea at least. Do I look like a programmer?
Originally advertised in 1983 by a Bay Area company named Dataspeed the handheld devices began shipping not long after in March 1984. Dataspeed would operate a datacenter in Burlingame, California which would accumulate real-time and after-hours information on over 20000 market listed stocks and encode it into a perpetually looping stream of serial data that could be efficiently pushed to receivers. This data was then sent either by satellite or by leased lines to remote cities where it would then be transmitted 24 hours a day to the handhelds at up to 9600bps. Rather than develop hardware for its own frequency, Dataspeed instead had the data be sent to the FM transmitter of a major local radio station and placed into the often unused FM sideband for that station. As a result, Dataspeed did not need to deal with the operation and maintenance of numerous transmitters scattered throughout the United States and offered a 40+ mile range.
Initial launches took place in what I would call ”The Usual Suspects”: New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. A handheld could be purchased for around $400 but could also be leased or rented. Access to the service was restricted by device serial number via a monthly subscription of about $45-$60. A handheld could be programmed by the user to capture and display the information of up to 100 stocks and also included support for audible notifications for high/low market conditions and one-way messages. (such as for notifications of subscription renewal) Dataspeed from the start also planned to expand the service to include weather, travel and news information. Ultimately the service would be deployed to a dozen major cities throughout the United States with more planned as the platform continued to sell. The product was marketed in magazines and even landed a spot on The Computer chronicles in 1986.
From then on it’s clear that Internet and Cellular Data based systems were the successor and the obsolete QuoTrek fell into relative obscurity to the new generation of brokers, traders and savvy businessmen.
Signal, somehow continues on to this very day under the name eSignal.
I first heard of the Quotrek in an old issue of Popular Science, dated May 1984. ( https://books.google.ca/books?id=lg...ce=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false ) That was about 20 years ago when Google was still in its infancy and searching up obsolete products as such with just a vague name was still a mild practice in how patient you could be going through pages of results which were not autogenerated clickbait schlock. Never found one however until many years later when one surfaced on ebay for $20usd. With nothing to lose and nobody else expressing interest in a receiver for a long-dead service I pulled the trigger on it and a separate listing for the charging adapter and a Lotus branded 9v DC adapter.
The handheld arrived in a very clean and soft simulated leather pouch that when flipped open revealed a windowed pocket for a business card and the pouch holding the handheld. The handheld while smaller than a Cybiko handheld communicator felt considerably less cheap. It was nice and weighty, the plastics had a quality feel to them and the finish felt very refined. A large non-backlit LCD screen with multi-function buttons, a very strange On/Off power switch and an extendible and surprisingly long antenna were standard.
Internally it was advertised to use a rechargeable battery, to which I concerningly noticed there was no door to access the battery so I feared the worst for cells that were likely more than 30 years old. The handheld hides the four screws under the four rubber feet and the back easily separates, revealing that the battery had only begun to leak and the leakage was minimal enough to be brushed off.
The heart of the handheld is a Motorola 68HC11 MCU. A custom chip from Oki marked “Gate Array2”, from which the piezo beeper was stuck on top handles the supporting glue and an EPROM stores the firmware and likely the device serial number. Above the void for the four half-size 1.2v gumstick batteries is the sealed and soldered RF module that is the FM receiver. Slightly below that is a 2.5mm jack, for which I am not sure what it’s used for.
The base of the handheld has gold plated pads which would connect to accessories, such as the charger. Those would arrive shortly after from our other seller in Northern California. Immediately I noticed both the charger and adapter were quite dirty and when assembled and attached to the QuoTrek it emitted a strange 60hz buzz and the screen randomly activated with garbage. Okay something’s wrong.
As it turned out, both the adapter and the power supply had been through a flood and while from the photo the damage looks quite bad the only fatalities was a 1000uf 10v lytic capacitor inside the AC adapter which was so dead it had fallen off the board and the red charge LED in the adapter, which I replaced with a green LED. Once that was cleaned up I was getting a nice DC output with no insane ripple but the QuoTrek still would not turn on. It seems like a lot of devices this was expecting a good battery in order to work at all.
Since I wasn’t about to source new batteries yet I instead snipped the leads and attached my regulated bench supply. At 5v I slid the switch to ON and it beeped, filled the screen and then greeted me with a READY prompt.
From here however we cannot do much else beyond navigate through the various settings. With no FM signal to receive and no subscription, stock information is permanently unavailable and with the battery long perished whatever was last stored in the handheld’s memory was lost. Interestingly though with the unit now functional I could see the other various indicators hidden on the LCD and among them was what implied was a mode for use with a modem.
As there was another three pins unused on the base of the handheld I could only suspect that an additional data interface, presumably serial, either for dialing a service by telephone or to send orders rather than receive them was possible.
This is all more or a less a mystery as I did not receive with it any documentation covering the various features or options as well as a better idea on how to operate the QuoTrek. Similarly, all information on the SIGNAL receiver seems to of faded with time as have many of their users in its final years. While now officially a paperweight I find it to be a curious step into the world of market trading technology and wonder if one day the likely analog and unencrypted data it would have received may be reverse-engineered for the sake of fun. Not my cup of tea at least. Do I look like a programmer?
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