Oliver <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Those of us who used the PICK-based Medrecord software (which had many 
> good features) had that experience when we reached a certain day several 
> years ago.  The PICK operating system and database stores dates 
> internally as the number of days since 31st December 1967, so that 
> 1/1/68 was day 1 and a month later was day 31 and a year later was day 
> 365, and so on.

For the trivia buffs: the PICK database/operating system (which was a thing of 
beauty and its fall from popularity was much lamented by many, as was the 
decline of the Revelation series of database environments based on it) was 
written by someone called Dick Pick working on commission from the Pentagon, 
which needed a system to keep track of its bombing campaigns (some of which 
were secret eg Cambodia and Laos prior to 1970) in Indochina. Hence the 
starting date for the epoch in PICK. True!

One nice thing about PICK was that all of the programme code, table parameters, 
screen designs and everything else used to implement an application were all 
stored as records in the database. The database was the operating system and 
the operating system was the database. Hence Oliver's ability to go in and fix 
things. 

Tim C

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