I have seen implementations. It is now an arcane fossil.
Dick Pick has been described as a serial monogamist and said to have named one of his systems after his favourite pass times. That was the Generalised Information Retrieval Language System (GIRLS).
One interesting thing about the Pick system was you could program it in a query language called "English". In The New Hacker's Dictionary, Eric S. Raymond described English as "a sort of crufty, brain-damaged SQL with delusions of grandeur." http://www.catb.org/esr/jargon/html/E/English.html
That can't be right, can it? How old is Mr. Pick? Did his parents know? Or was that not a thing yet? If they didn't know, they were more prescient than the Oracle at Delphi.
Joking aside, I did work in late '90 with Pick system :
- interesting concept and performance
- but every backup restores attempt was like Russian roulette
By the way, as a textual only OS, I have never seen dick pick on it 😂
My recollection is that it was pretty powerful in its day, especially for programs that crunched large amounts of numbers. It also had some weird limitations.
2KB page size (which IBM stopped supporting at some point under OS/390 (more likely to have been dropping hardware support for 2K pages with the 9672, etc.)), coupled with processor and external storage were lumped together, so you could add more disk to increase capacity but never remove any. 3:OP>
he was given that name in the hopes that the angel of nominative determinism would guide him to pioneer an exciting hands-free style of guitar but nooooo he just had to get into programming
Oh, Pick! That's what it was called. I worked at a company that was still using something descended from this and had to replace a decades-old driver that didn't work on the current versions of Linux at the time for a web API to use.
Comments
Dick Pick has been described as a serial monogamist and said to have named one of his systems after his favourite pass times. That was the Generalised Information Retrieval Language System (GIRLS).
https://csixty4.medium.com/pick-is-a-living-fossil-of-computer-history-36d74408d557
http://www.catb.org/esr/jargon/html/E/English.html
- interesting concept and performance
- but every backup restores attempt was like Russian roulette
By the way, as a textual only OS, I have never seen dick pick on it 😂
Until recently London Underground used it for train scheduling. One of the newer UK banks built their first systems on it.
PICK is a long way from dead.
https://www.zumasys.com/
https://notes.rolandcrosby.com/posts/unexpectedly-eponymous/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick%27s_Picks