The industry lost one of its most colourful characters with the death on Monday of Dick Pick from complications resulting from the stroke he suffered on October 6 at the age of 56. Pick Systems Inc has appointed its vice-president of marketing Brian Stone as acting chief executive. Dick Pick founded Pick & Associates in 1972 after working at TRW Inc as a programmer before joining IBM Corp. The Pick operating system, with its integral database, first appeared as the environment of the Microdata Reality system in 1973, the concept of the integrated database pre-dating IBM Corp’s System/38, which evolved into the AS/400, by six years.
