By Phil Albinus 

It never was supposed to be this fast and furious.

When the first Wall Street traders hooked up their own personal computers (most likely IBM PCs or early IBM clones from Compaq), the machines were going to make things faster and easier -- more efficient, in other words. But soon, affordable networking cards attached the PCs to one another and then to the capital markets.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Wall Street went digital, and electronic trading exploded. Add in high-speed processors, low-latency networks, truly electronic trading platforms and dark pools, and the high-frequency future of trading had arrived.

But executing near the speed of light can be dangerous. Along with fast trades often have come loose control and severe crashes.

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