Black and white images can be difficult to make out, but during the post-WWII parades that took place across the country, there was always one constant: the ticker tape. The home of the ticker tape, however, was not on the parade route, but within the stock exchange, where the tape has had a colorful history of helping to shape the current financial structure in the US. But where did the tape and the machines that used it come from? Was the original design for the trading floor done?

Also, let’s take a look at the name. A tic was a term used to describe the slight movement of stocks. These machines (think a computer printer, but in 1867) were used to track stock movements by recording each transaction and then transmitting the results.

Taking a look at what was recorded on the ticker tape, well, let’s just say you would need to know quite a bit about investing before everything you see on the tape makes sense. For a transaction, the tape would record multiple characters. The first set was the stock’s ticker symbol. A ticker symbol is simply a shortened name of a company, usually 3-4 letters long that lets investors know what stocks are being traded. The second set of symbols was the number of shares traded. Usually the amounts are large, so if the number of shares were in the thousands, the reading could be something like 3k times 3,000. The next set of symbols are numbers that designate what the trading price of that particular stock was. This is also known as the last sale price. The next symbol is the easiest to read, it will be an up arrow to show that the stock price is heading up compared to yesterday’s closing price or it will be a down arrow showing that the stock price heads down. The final set of numbers shows how much the stock price changed, for better or for worse.

Today’s tickers are electronic and the days of ticker tape are over. The only place you’re likely to see a ticker tape machine these days is in a museum or on an episode of The Simpsons (Mr. Burns has one).

While the ticker tape is no longer in use, it was synonymous with Wall Street and investing in America for generations. And yes, even today, if there’s a big parade somewhere, you can bet that rolls of duct tape will be used to make the event as festive as possible.