The Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange are ready to start trying out the handheld computers for recording deals with brokers on the trading floors: the computers are intended to replace the slips of paper on which deals are presently recorded – curiously, the slips are dropped on the floor and messengers scurry around collecting them up and initially a 16 oz battery-powered trading card, developed by Evanston, Illinois-based Spectrix Corp and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co will be tested by several members from the exchanges during practice sessions in a mock trading arena installed one story above the Mercantile trading floor; two other systems, one from Texas Instruments Inc, the other from Synderdyne Corp will be tried out in later tests; the units cost $3,000 to $5,000.
