A Brief History of the Pick Environment in Australia - History of Computing: Learning from the Past - page 154

Table 2. ( Continued )

Identity Company Views

Barry
Churchill

NRMA Pick must employ the principles of TQM in continually addressing

seamless integration with today's (1992) technology. Pick needs to listen
to its users to understand what their needs are. After all, it's the “users”
who will buy the business systems [28].

Bob
Highland

General
Automation

Coexistence with LANs such as Novell's IPX. Pick should make sure that
it is interoperable with ubiquitous PCs and other workstations [29].

BIX Pick needed to be ported to the 'state-of-the-art' 3270/RJE and HASP
protocols. Microsoft to re-introduce command line for Windows/LANMan
and Client/Server systems. ADDS terminal division releases a toast-r-oven
connection to their 9000 series terminal [30].
The recurring themes from the Pick community were that Pick as an operating sys-
tem was doomed and that Unix was to be the host of the future. Interoperability with
the burgeoning PC marketplace and other systems (RDBMS 9 ) was the next theme
followed by the emerging industry standards such as SQL. Networking was addressed
by some and its relative low profile in these discussions indicated how little the Pick
community thought about TCP/IP, LANs and distributed databases.

Alan
Glassman

3.9 Pick's Popularity

During the 1980's through to Y2K Pick boasted that it had more business solutions
available than any other environment. There was even a publication called “The Busi-
ness Software Catalog” that detailed over 3,000 such business applications [31]. The
vast library of systems written in Pick/BASIC could be ported from single user
machines through to high-end symmetric multi-processors with redundant non-stop
capabilities supporting thousands of real-time users.
By this time there were numerous flavours of the Pick environment available. They
are detailed in the appendix which illustrates clearly the competition in the Pick
community. In addition there were several integrated development environments
based on Pick called fourth generation languages (4GL) or CASE 10 tools that ranged
from elementary program generators such as Wizard 11 to truly configuration and data
driven enterprise-class engines such as Cuebic 12 , SB+ 13 and Posh 14 .
In the 1990's it was not uncommon for an organization to identify a software solu-
tion that it needed and to purchase (separately) the hardware platform upon which to
mount an operating system (such as Unix), a version of Pick (such as Universe), a
4GL (such as Posh) and the accounting, finance and HR system written in Posh. The
average CFO could not understand why it was not possible to get everything from one
9 RDBMS: Relational Database Management System.
10 CASE: Computer Aided Software Engineering.
11 Wizard: An early program generator that “created” PICK/Basic code from user entered
parameters to describe transaction processes against Pick databases.
12 Cuebic: A name alluding to the three dimensional nature of the Pick data model.
13 SB+: System Builder plus.
14 Posh: An acronym for “Port Out Starboard Home”, the preferred window allocation on trans-
Atlantic boat trips. The name was adopted by its designer and developer Warren Dickins, a
boating enthusiast.