A Brief History of the Pick Environment in Australia - History of Computing: Learning from the Past - page 156

• In the older days, nobody was ever sacked for buying IBM

• Corporate leaders meet and compare notes about their respective IT solutions

• Universities control the corporate thinking

• Thousands of graduates have only ever been exposed to the Codd relational

model and cannot conceive of other models

• Students are increasingly educated using artificial business models that neatly

fit their relational toolkits and avoid real-world complexity

The Pick community was certainly not united. Even the local Victorian IPUA at-
tempted to assuage their vendors' sensibilities by renaming themselves to the “Multi
Dimensional Database Forum” to remove the word “Pick” from the association name.
Few licencees embraced TCP/IP and fewer still acknowledged SQL and interoperabil-
ity, and those that did make such an investment ensured that it remained proprietary
and certainly not portable to other Pick vendors.

4 Conclusions

The Pick community's inability to work together on keeping up with technology will
be one of the reasons that many organisations will be electing to drop Pick as their
preferred business platform and select more expensive mainstream solutions.
There were some efforts to create a Windows-based front end but it came to noth-
ing as funding was limited to one vendor. It is also my own opinion that industry was
so used to the two dimensional database model that interfaces tended to mirror the
spreadsheet in concept. Pick's data model being inherently three (or even four) di-
mensional was difficult to effectively represent with the tools of the day. It is of pass-
ing interest that today's advanced HTML is now capable of such a representation
without too much difficulty.
It is also curious to note that no popular operating system has been named after its
inventor. Had PickOS been named something like OSMV (OS Multi-value) then a lot
of criticism might have been avoided, and many days in the California Superior Court
likewise avoided. And had Dick Pick named his programming language similarly
after the famous courtesans like Pascal and Ada, perhaps something like “Zion” might
have reduced the criticisms of the language name. But it is perception that matters
today and perception is reality. Perception is a controlled substance and today
the accepted orthodoxies are Windows point and click, Internet, Unix, rigorous Codd
relational model and it just has to be “world's best practice”, whatever that means.
With accountants independently making the key decisions today, businesses are
happy to change their business models and processes to align with some “best” stan-
dard from Europe or America as manifested in a small selection of “Enterprise” sys-
tems. Thanks to the largest software manufacturer in the world, it doesn't necessarily
have to work entirely properly either.

References

1. Gadamer, H.-G. (ed.): The Historicity of Understanding. Critical Sociology, Selected
Readings, Connerton, P. (ed.). Penguin Books Ltd., Harmondsworth (1976)
2. Gadamer, H.-G.: Truth and Method, 3rd edn. Continuum, London (2004)
3. Forrester, C.: Interview (2010)
4. Hewlett-Packard, MPE-IV Software Pocket Guide. Hewlett Packard, Cupertino (1981)