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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

No Pick?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system

My first actual job was working for a local health authority here in the UK, and they had a Pick computer running some database application thing, I think to do with accounting. I had to run the backups. Sorry to be a whinger, I don't mean to belittle the monumental amount of work.

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Similar experience here. I worked on an ERP system for a chemical distributor that ran on 5 Honeywell Ultimate systems distributed across the US. General ledger, order management, warehouse order pick lists, chemical recipes, MSDS data, inventory, etc. We synced database updates every night, and once a month someone had to spend the night in the datacenter swapping 9 track tapes for backups.

I loved working in Pick BASIC on those systems. So much you could do with "dict items"

What a legendary name for the developer.

Omg, I am dead. Dick Pick. That is the best name, not just for a developer :D

Just a few weeks ago I met a guy with the same first name, but his last name was Head. No joke. I spared him the jokes.

Bet he wishes his surname was Bastard. Rich Bastard.

That's great! He is a friend of a friend of my mother, I'll suggest that she call him that!

Dick is a normal, be it old-fashioned, first name in The Netherlands.

Sure, but Dick Head is far more commonly expressed as an expletive than as a name.

Ha. My first SW job interview was for a programmer on a Pick system at some small company in Manhattan. I think they were involved in publishing or something. Anyway, the salary they offered was so pitifully low all I could do was politely decline. Was too young to even know that I could negotiate.

I wrote software for Robinson Helicopter using Pick up till the early 2000s. They used it for the production, manufacting and inventory control. It was based on a system called PRO:MAN.

I've got Pick PC R83 V3.1 included. The screenshots on the front page are a very small sampling of what's there.

Cool. I couldn’t find a way to search the site.

When I was a young broth of a boy I worked as a field engineer looking after a whole bunch of different hardware. One of these was a Pick machine with its own dedicated Pick branded hardware, amongst a fleet of terminals and early PC hardware. Nothing ever seemed to go wrong with it.

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