From the kitchen table in his Upper West Side brownstone, Michael Dubno recently scratched out from memory the blueprint for the modern Goldman Sachs.

The sketches, dashed out on a yellow legal pad, more or less match what Dubno drew on a white board 25 years ago, in a dusty corner office on the fifth floor of Goldman's old downtown headquarters: a schematic for a software database that would help the investment bank make billions of dollars in well-timed trades, and sidestep billions more in losses.