Before electronic banking, how did wealthy businessmen keep track of their earnings?
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People are talking about doing math with pencil and paper (or with calculators or adding machines) which is a part of it, of course.
But as for things like keeping track of current stock prices, commodity prices, bond and interest rates, those values were published in newspapers at the end of each day. Especially wealthy and well-connected traders would have stock tickers — physical printers connected to telegraph lines that would print out the latest market prices continuously. They would also have men (they were always men back then) calling up brokerages on landline telephones, once those became a thing.
The “Stock ticker” apps and websites are called that because of the ticking sounds the teleprinters made banging out the numbers.
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