The Pick operating system, which was originally developed for a stores data management system US military project way back in the mid-1960s, has evolved into a commercial multi-user system – for users as opposed to technicians – with an in-built relational database and English-like enquiry language at its heart. According to a new report by the International Database Management Association, San Diego, California, Dick Pick’s brainchild is now thought to have around 2m users worldwide, and over 3,000 applications have been written specifically to run under it. Yet its immediate prospects – according to the report – are somewhat shaky. Parental home At the parental home in Irvine, California, Pick Systems Inc has a pragmatic plan to integrate Pick with the most widely-used variants of Unix, as well as other operating systems such as OS/2, over the next year or so. The IDMA’s industry report on the Pick market essentially confirms the need for these initiatives, predicting that the survival of Pick will be linked to its coexistence with other operating systems. Recent industry trends towards coalescence add further impetus to this direction, with Sanyo Electric Co, Edgcore Technology, Sequoia Systems, Stratus Computer, Ultimate Corp, NCR’s Applied Digital Data Systems and McDonnell Douglas all offering or working on marriages of Pick with Unix. Early versions of Pick were developed on machines from Microdata Corp – now the basis of McDonnell Douglas Corp’s information systems business – which were built under licence in France by Intertechnique Informatique SA. The first implementation for another processor was the one done for Honeywell’s Level 6 minicomputer on behalf of Ultimate Corp, which became the first Pick licensee in 1978. In 1981 the first implementation for an IBM machine appeared on the Series 1 mini, and in the same year Pick & Associates adopted the name by which it is known today – Pick Systems Inc. A couple of years later the MS-DOS revolution kicked further life into Pick, it being one of the few software environments capable of running in a business environment on concurrent, multiuser personal computers: versions for the XT and AT were released in 1984 and 1985. The first version of Pick under Unix was developed by VMark Software Inc in 1985, which called the thing uniVerse – and it was written in C and not Pick assembler. By William Fellows The long promised Open Architecture version of Pick was not unveiled until 1986, and its reception was a disappointment, because it was seen to contain few enhancements over classic Pick. Open Architecture version 2 and Advanced Pick soon followed, which attempted to address the shortcomings, but their arrival only seemed to confuse the market, rather than galvanise it into Pick activity. Although Pick, with its in-built relational database, is ideal for business environments, in the open systems market, applications and operating systems stand or fall on their ability to perform a complete range of computing tasks. Here Pick falls down in several crucial areas. In scientific computing, where it is easily surpassed by Unix, Pick cannot compete because its lacks high floating point performance and mathematical functions – which is a bit like saying a motor car can’t fly because it doesn’t have wings and a propeller. More importantly, communication features essential to the interaction of open and distributed systems networks are lacking, and security is weak. Office automation applications are also lacking. Although word processing, spreadsheet and graphics functions do exist, the IDMA’s report found users to be less than satisfied with them. Despite the practical shortcomings of trying to position Pick in an open systems environment for which it was not really designed, perhaps the real problem is more simple. Nick Drescher, president of UCL Group Plc, observed that fundamentally, Pick falls down because it is not a well-known operating system backed by a large company. IBM operating systems are accepted simply because they come from IBM, and Unix is accepted – d
espite all its variations – because it has AT&T and other majors behind it. In the stand-alone systems market, the report reckons that MS-DOS has 66%, Unix, 31%, and Pick just 3%, and suggests that when Unix climbs to a forecast 44% in 1993, and MS-DOS declines to around 50%, Pick will only have increased its share to 5% – but hey, that’s not bad if the forecast means what it implies, that with all the forces of IBM and Microsoft Corp behind it, OS/2 will still have garnered only 1% of the market! And the Unix message is clearly spelt out – most importantly – by users. In the report, of those respondants who said they were evaluating alternative operating systems, 63% said they were giving Unix serious consideration, 64% said a Pick-only system was out of the question, and over half said they would select a Unix/Pick system. Nevertheless Pick is still important to its users – the report claims that nearly 90% reckoned that the use of Pick had given their business a competitive edge. Comfortable living So how can Pick Systems reconcile these forces and still come out on top? The IDMA predicts that by 1993, 86% of all Pick suppliers will offer Pick and Unix concurrently – the figure is around 50% at present – with the present 2m users rising to 8m in 10 years. The installed base of Pick systems is projected to grow to 250,000 from 100,000 by 1993. The report suggests that integration of Pick and Unix will prove a life saver for the Pick operating system, but the traffic is a little less one way than seems to be implied – Unix still needs all the commercial applications it can get, and so by running cosily under Unix, Pick can do the AT&T operating system a big favour. Moreover, although we have no numbers for it, Pick quite clearly has a much bigger share of the UK market than it does in the US, providing the likes of McDonnell-Douglas Information Systems, Sanderson Computers Plc, Electronic Data Processing Plc and UCL Group Plc with a very comfortable living and doing enough to justify Bull HN keeping the DPS 6 in production for a few years yet. And if it is well-fancied in the UK, it is a positive obsession in Australia. The report, Industry Impact Study – The Pick Marketplace, is available from IDMA, San Diego, California, price $50.
