A Brief History of the Pick Environment in Australia - History of Computing: Learning from the Past - page 146

A Brief History of the Pick Environment in Australia
Stasys Lukaitis
School of Business Information Technology RMIT Melbourne Australia
[e-mail]
Abstract. Mainstream Information Technology professionals have misunder-
stood the Pick environment for many years. The Pick environment has been
conceived, designed and built with business solutions as its key driver. At its
heyday there were over 3,000 business applications available across a very wide
range of hardware platforms supporting from 1 to thousands of real time users.
The tentative economic recovery of the 90's and the Y2K fears created cautious
and conservative corporate decision-making. During those tumultuous years
there were startling leaps in information and communications technology
rewarding those who invested in the future and in themselves. The Pick com-
munity at the time were fragmented and somewhat narrow-minded in their view
of the future and were unable to collectively invest in developing new tech-
nologies. Corporate executive peer group pressure to adopt “vanilla” relational
technologies and the desire for homogeneity is creating even more pressure on
the Pick community.
Keywords: Pick; Universe; Unidata; Prime; Revelation; jBase; Reality; Multi-
value; Correlative; D3.
1 Introduction
A simple Google search for the PICK environment or database will reveal a plethora
of information about the history of the Pick Operating System and DBMS over the
years. It is not the intention of this paper to repeat what is already freely available.
Suffice it to say that PICK was 'invented' in the USA by Richard (Dick) Pick and
Don Nelson as contractors for TRW on the Cheyenne Helicopter parts and mainte-
nance project. The Appendix shows the various incarnations of the product as well as
its early entry into Europe through Microdata Intertechnique in France.
This paper seeks to highlight an interesting historical period in the development of
Information and Communications Technology in Australia and to notice the various
influences of (then) emerging factors on the Information Systems that were in use at
that time, and the Pick environment as an interesting example. The period under in-
vestigation is the last two decades of the twentieth century 1980-2000, with the em-
phasis on the early 1990s and the period approaching the Y2K event.
1.1 Research Approach
Thus this is a hermeneutical analysis of a brief period in Australian IT history using
the Pick environment as the driver. Hermeneutics is a philosophy of enquiry that