Pick had elegant seamless virtual memory so you never had to consider
the size of the objects you were programming, variable length database
records, and hash addressing down to operating system level.
It was hard to get the brain to work that way if you grew up with
dBase2, but it was worth the effort.
Tim Churches wrote:
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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