[jnordwick]

In finance, I know it goes back to Island ECN (which became part of NASDAQ). They had a small group of heavy talent that spread out to a number of high profile banks and prop shops. I've worked at a few places with the same architecture and it always seems to lead back to those guys at Island by a couple degrees.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was some cross pollination. I regularly read game dev blogs for ideas and information. While trading tends to have higher latency requirements and stronger networking requireemnts, games have other issues (the PCI bus and graphics card), but in the end there are a lot of architectural similarities and both tend to be a small group of highly skilled developers so you have a lot more freedom to chose complex index and advanced tooling.