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Comment by berbec | Hacker News Reader

A client i work for used a Pick system and it's maintained by one dude. He's in his 60s, so who knows how long they'll be able to get support...

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system

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I work on a bunch of Pick systems :) Love it all and we're still doing active development. (Feel free to send me an e-mail, we pick up orphaned systems)

If anyone wants to take a look, here are some links:

Open source version: https://github.com/geneb/ScarletDME

The last version of true pick: https://github.com/Krowemoh/R83

> It is named after one of its developers, Dick Pick

Wikipedia vandals these days...

There's a completely unironic obituary linked from the LA Times from 1994, which makes me wonder if the scandalous meaning even existed yet in those days?

Well it started with smartphones, so no.

Dick Pick, initially released on GIRLS.

Wow

Hahahahahaha - the kids are alright

I should become a maintainer to keep the legacy going…

My dad recently retired but his company was still using Pick as of a year or two ago. They also had a one-dude maintenance plan. I wonder if it was the same dude.

My first job out of college was over 2 decades ago, and I was hired to work on a web app which was considered new technology. But an important application there that was used by hundreds of people around the country was written with Pick, and the owner of the company also had some local Houston businesses whose Pick applications he occasionally did maintenance work on. The owner had moved from Chicago to Houston at the beginning of the 80s because he was able to get a high-paying job with no degree, but when the oil bust happened he learned Pick programming from an older guy and did so well when he started his own business that he retired early.

So many of these systems were one man shops. It really speaks to how easy to develop pick systems was. It still very much is.

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