Re: What is Pick anyway?

DonR wrote:
> David Cressey wrote:
> > "DonR" <donr_work_at_yahoo.com> wrote in message
> > news:1135744411.676896.96910_at_g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> > > David Cressey wrote:
> >
  <snip>
> >

As promised earlier, here is some hopefully interesting info on MV/Pick software.

The history of Multi-valued software.

I became involved with Pick software in the early 80's so some of this is based on what I've read.

The story goes something like this. In the 60's, the United States Air Force contracted with defense contractor TRW to maintain the USAF's helicopter fleet. Since this required the warehousing of thousands of parts, TRW needed some kind of computer system to keep track of these parts.

TRW hired Richard (Dick) Pick and, I think, another person to setup a system. At that time, computers were big, very expensive and difficult to program. After some review of the situation, Mr. Pick decided to write his own system.

After leaving TRW, Mr. Pick obtained the rights to the software but because the US government had paid for the development, the design became public domain. Or something like that. I think the first commercial implementation was on a Microdata computer. Microdata called the software Reality and Reality still exists today although ownership has changed hands several times.

Despite being in the public domain, over the years Mr. Pick successfully sued several companies. He extracted rather hefty license fees to "port" his software to some 30 minicomputers. At this time, the Operating System functionality and the database were one.

The BASIC programming language was added later so the early systems had PROC, a sort of script/job control/programming language. PROC has one letter commands and uses several buffers to store data. It is both easy to learn and hard to learn. But once learned, it is quite useful. In fact, one of the largest medical device manufactures in the world used PROC exclusively for many years and only in the last couple of years has used BASIC for new development.

These early systems used assembler code for the core functionality. The hardware specific code was separate from the remaining code so porting to new hardware was rather straightforward. This is one of the features that was ahead of its time. Today the hardware specific code is called "device drivers".

In order to be different and maybe to avoid Mr. Pick's lawyers, each of the vendors gave their version of Pick their own name, such as Reality, Ultimate, Prime Information, Universe, Unidata, jBASE, mvBase, UniVision, OpenQM, etc. Even Pick Systems called it Pick R83, Advanced Pick, Pick AP and D3 over the years. Some functions within each version were given unique names. For example, the query language, which consists of a few commands like LIST and SELECT, is called English, Access, RetriVe, etc.

I think the various names plus the fact that the database was sold by VARs as part of their application software accounts for Pick being relatively unknown. One of the customers I work for refers to their MRP system as Wintigrate, which is a terminal eliminator! It is actually Unidata. Probably only the IT manager knows they are running "Pick".

The assembler code, PROC and variable record lengths provided a very efficient system. System with 64k, yes k, of memory could run several users. Although hardware cost hundred of thousands of dollars customers bought them because other systems cost even more and did less.

One other vendor I haven't mentioned is Revelation Software. A company of 5 people called COSMOS wrote Revelation in the early 80's. They actually wrote an emulator on a Pick system that emulated the Intel 8086 chip prior to the availability of the IBM PC! Thus Revelation was one of the first software packages for the PC. The entire program came on one 360k floppy. I know because I still have it! Revelation Software still sell a character based version but also sells a GUI version called OpenInsight. It runs on Windows and Linux.

To be continued with BASIC and the Pick file system.

Cheers,
Don Received on Thu Dec 29 2005 - 21:21:41 CET