Linux Magazine: Linux’s Perfect Storm

“Though nobody knew it at the time, it turns out that April 1,
2001 was an important date in the annals of the Linux operating
system. That was the deadline (mandated by the Securities and
Exchange Commissions) for equities markets and trading companies in
the United States to switch from their centuries-old practice of
trading shares in fractions of a dollar to a decimal-based trading
system.

“Aside from making things a little more tricky for day-traders,
the decimalization of stock exchanges like the Nasdaq and the New
York Stock Exchange (NYSE) created one high-priced headache for IT
departments, who not only had to deal with the conversion itself,
but also had to cope with the massive increase in trading volume
that came with the switch from listing shares in sixteenths to
listing shares in cents.

“As if 2001 hadn’t been hard enough for finance industry IT
managers: budgets had been slashed, and fee-based trading was
adding complexity and sucking clock cycles from machine rooms,
leaving IT managers to squeeze every last ‘flop’ of productivity
out of their networks…”

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