Hacker News Reader

Comment by tiahura | Hacker News Reader

Upvoting for Pick mention.

A blast from the past! Years ago I worked on some J2EE nonsense to do e-commerce websites on top of a Pick application. It was I think called Mailbrain, I think running on HPUX though I could be mis-remembering. There was a horrible text based socket protocol for passing data records back and forth.

I do remember the Pick greybeards being dismissive of this new fangled SQL stuff: "we had relational databases before SQL don't you know"

I only ever saw Pick here in New Zealand running on Pr1me.

Pick ran on a plethora of different platforms. Ultimate even had a port for IBM mainframes, PICK/370.

How much use all these different ports saw, I don’t know. Obviously some of them were pretty big (you mention Prime, I’ll mention R83) - others less so. I wonder how many customers IBM RT PC PICK ever actually had. Probably significantly less than PICK ever had on AIX for RS/6000 (at one point several different PICK vendors offered Unix ports, and AIX was commonly on the list of supported Unix flavours)

Universe is alive and, not well, but surviving. It’s still used in a common central banking system. Still chugging away on AIX too.

I hate it.

> I wonder how many customers IBM RT PC PICK ever actually had.

According to Wikipedia:

Approximately 23,000 RTs were sold over its lifetime, with some 4,000 going into IBM's development and sales organizations. Pick OS sales accounted for about 4,000 units.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com