We usually at least recognize old computer hardware and software names. But Asianmoetry taught us a new one: Pick OS. This 1960s-era system was sort of a database and sort of an operating system for big iron used by the Army. The request was for an English-like query language, and TRW assigned two guys, Don Nelson and Dick Pick, to the job.
The planned query language would allow for things like “list the title, author, and abstract of every transportation system reference with the principal city ‘Los Angeles’.” This was GIM or generalized information management, and, in a forward-looking choice, it ran in a virtual machine.
↫ Al Williams at Hackaday
The linked article is a short summary of a YouTube video by the YouTube channel Asianometry, which goes into a lot more detail about Pick OS, where it came from, what it can do, who the people involved were, and where Pick OS eventually ended up. I had never heard of this system before, and it’s easy to see why – not only was it used almost exclusively in vertically integrated complete solutions, it was also whitelabeled, so it existed under countless different names.
Regardless, it seems the people who actually had to use it were incredibly enthusiastic about it, and to this day you can read new comments from people fondly remembering how easy to use it was. It has always been proprietary, and still is to this day, apparently owned by a company called Rocket Software, who don’t seem to actually be doing anything with it.
Rocket continue to sell and support UniVerse, a database system coupled with the PICK programming language. It was in use at a previous financial institution I worked at for “green screen” ledger applications used by bank tellers, The devs loved it.
Rocket have basically acquired everything in the space, and actively are selling multiple different PICK systems these days, and the stuff to talk to them.
There’s technically no real issue with even putting new solutions on them, though perhaps not the best idea to do with text based interfaces (there’s multiple ways to talk to them besides the text terminals). I’ve a few clients running different ones still, some of them have implemented them new. Each to their own.
I actually worked on on a database imported from a Pick system, it’s big thing was multi-value fields.
I had no idea one of the engineers was named “Dick Pick”. I can’t help but be immature and note that title works as a pun. Even the “‘s” you added helps sell it, haha.
More trivia: Before being called Pick Operating System, it was named Generalized Information Retrieval Language System (GIRLS).
I looked up more sources to make sure I wasn’t being trolled by wikipedia, but it seems correct…
https://csixty4.medium.com/pick-is-a-living-fossil-of-computer-history-36d74408d557
See https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/eyz1kj/have_you_heard_of_pick_database/
Yup. Been around years and cloned all over the place. SWeng mate of mine wrote and supported Pick BASIC until only around 5 years back. It still had a big(ish) place in the world of insurance.
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When I was a kid my uncle installed a Pick system in the glass factory he was a partner at, and later he built a business around selling the package he developed for such industry. I became a programmer there later on.
Pick was fun! We used its Basic language to give the business workflow an user-friendly menus and forms-based UI, it mostly just building the appropriate Access query phrases. Its delimiter marks-based DB and the separation between data and presentations (“dictionaries”) was very freeing.
(I built some reusable terminal-based windowing stuff because of course I did )
And what a great name!
I programmed commercially on Prime Information from 1987 to 1992, on PI Plus for a year, and then on Universe from 1993 until 2007. All Pick clones. Beautiful environment. Prime Information was so far ahead of its time it was frightening. Anyone who used that database environment with an I-Type cannot understand why databases are so poor these days. Rocket software now control this software and have not done a very good job of popularizing it in my opinion. Shame on them. They could have done so much better. Very very short-sighted. Ultimately Prime Computers destroyed Prime Information. They had the chance to lead the world in a very powerful DBMS/4GL type world that could have dominated the PC market for decades. Aaaaah well, such is the technology industry, no use crying over spilt milk. PS : Rocket Software – get with it man ….. think out of the box …..
I worked on PICK-based systems for over a decade – that taught me efficiency, hashing algorithms, and many other things. Imagine, a Windows NT 4 Server running UniVerse, with 32MB (not GB) RAM, on a Compaq Server with a built-in RAID array. It ran as fast as lightning – the only slowdown, was if your files went into “overflow” (hash buckets spilling) and then you’d have to resize them. Otherwise, one disk seek-per-record, if you’d designed things correctly. They were fast previously, now the’ll be instant in these days of SSD, M2 and so on. NoSQL? MultiValues = JSON arrays these days. PICK has already been there, and lets you do anything you want, the challenge, is to be responsible enough (in software) to enforce your own limits.
Q-pointers – these days, I use SQL Server views that reference other databases and tables. Correlatives? LEFT OUTER JOINs by another name. I remember getting our first XEON server at the company I worked for at the time – DATABASIC compilations flew those asterisks by! Motorola Powerstack was cool also on the UNIX side, I still have one of the little plastic paperclip/desk-tidy versions of one of those somewhere.
Happy times indeed – simplicity done right.