Talk:Pick operating system

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Contents 1 doubt the neutrality 2 PROC 3 firmware vs. software implementations 4 Year 2000

[edit] doubt the neutrality

Does anyone else, upon reading sentences like the following,

"Pick is considered by many who use it to be years ahead of its competitors..."

...rather doubt the neutrality of the last few contributors to this article?

Such an assessment might have been true in 1985, but is rather hard to justify in 2005. I don't know why I get this impression, but the whole article reads as if written by some UK-residing Pick zealot who has little or no background in any other system. (And I speak as someone who's worked 25+ years in Pick.)

---

I've only used Pick a little, but I also question the statements about it being years ahead of its competitors, as well as the Pick database is still far more powerful and efficient than any other. I won't make any claim to being very familiar with any particular database system; but I seem to recall a less rosy picture of Pick than the article suggests. More importantly, though, is that it's easy to say that the database is 'faster, stronger, better' but there are no references made to back up the claim. In some ways it's more akin to an advertisement than an objective article.

I've removed the two offending sentences. The article is generally flawed in that none of its content is verifiable: there are no citations online or offline. flavius 02:42, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

I used A CMC Reality system for several years in the mid 70s. Yes, it is idiosyncratic in its ways, and you don't have the mathematical rigour of a SQL database (which didn't exist at the time; Dr Codd was only just enunciating the principles of relational databases). But in terms of getting the job done, I think the comments in the article are perfectly justified. For some applications, I would still rather do it in PICK and Data/Basic than in the various modern solutions I use today. For me the most telling point is that we had a powerful mini-computer for the day - it had a 50MB disc and 80 kB of main memory. Using these minute resources (by today's standards), it supported multiple users - we often had a dozen or so at once, and operated a dial-up bureau service for some of our clients. --APRCooper (talk) 16:13, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] PROC

PROCs seems to be viatl part of Pick/multivalued systems. Anyone would like to share some knowledge on that in the main article?--Aou 22:36, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

I added a stub on PROC. PROC is similar to UNIX shell scripts. In my experiences long ago, PROCs were often used in PICK but they were not essential. Lamorak 16:08, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] firmware vs. software implementations

Corrected a factual error: The Ultimate segment had this sentence: "This was the first implemenation to be done in software only, so upgrades were accomplished by a tape load, rather than a new chip." This is inaccurate, as the article reflects, Ultimate was a firmware port. A new section was added to provide a factual home for that sentence, as ADDS was the first of the software ports. --Playabender 22:29, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Year 2000

Since this is such an old OS, that was used past 2000 -- what year 2000 issues did various versions of Pick have? In what years will the various versions become unusable, for what reasons? Can the older software be run on newer hardware, perhaps under some sort of VM? -69.87.199.23 (talk) 13:27, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

As far as I know, PICK stores dates as a simple decimal number (days since it was invented) so in theory it would go past 2000 without noticing. TobyJ (talk) 16:15, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes, Pick keeps track of the date by a count of days since Dec. 31, 1967 (Day 0). Y2K would have only been an issue with programs that used a 2-digit year. So, there could have been some problems from that standpoint. But, as far as the operating system goes, no problems were introduced at the turn of the millenium. - Charleca (talk) 20:58, 15 May 2008 (UTC)