Here's how Wall Street traded before Bloomberg terminals were everything

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.

Brokers called the main trading room downtown 'The Curb Exchange.' This was before it became the American Stock Exchange.

Photo from 1915.

Much of the time, deals would be conducted out of windows to traders on curbs.

And traders were hardcore. Here they are on the Curb Exchange during a snowstorm.