MV community lawsuits

I started to research the history of the MultiValue query language
because I was trying to figure out why it was so much easier to use
than SQL. I was curious why it didn't evolve into an update language.
I was/am looking into the future of data models and related languages
for query and update. When I embarked on this in 2001, I found the
stories behind the technology fascinating. One area I did not delve
into much is the area of lawsuits. There have been a flood of lawsuits
in the MultiValue world. A couple of them are:

Pick vs TRW from whom he, uh, obtained the original code
Pick vs Microdata (Pick married the secretary and former girlfriend of
Don Fuller, the President of Microdata)

and the more recent UniData lawsuits with Pacific UniData, with final
settlements during the acquisition of Informix by IBM IIRC.

I have read bits and pieces about many others such as Pick vs just
about everyone.

Since I was supposedly interested in tracing the movement of the
languages and data model, I didn't take many notes on these. Seeing
how many, uh, *seasoned* professionals there on this list, I thought
I'd ask what lawsuits anyone recalls among Pick and Pick-a-like
vendors. It seems like a history worth recording.

I really have no plans for use of this information -- just curious
right now. What lawsuits does anyone know about or recall? Thanks in
advance. --dawn

Dawn, tell us the truth. You are working on a Reality series for NBC.
Jeff

"> Pick vs TRW from whom he, uh, obtained the original code

Pick vs Microdata (Pick married the secretary and former girlfriend of
Don Fuller, the President of Microdata)

Jeff Caspari wrote:

Dawn, tell us the truth. You are working on a Reality series for NBC.

If I had the talent and time, I'd work on a screenplay. When
researching the technology, I ended up hearing stories of lawsuits,
drugs, theft, and the usual fare of debauchery and also espionage and
murder that had tangential relationships to the MV world. I cannot
image that a soap opera could be so colorful.

So the Reality series idea is open for you to run with, Jeff. Perhaps
put five pickies in a house and see who can come up with the first
winning lawsuit? (No, please, I would prefer the lawsuit thing be
history).

Ultimate comes from your neck of the woods, right? Did you follow any
of those court cases? Was the mob involved? (Those are the type of
politically-incorrect questions this mid-westerner has).

Cheers! --dawn

Jeff

"> Pick vs TRW from whom he, uh, obtained the original code
Pick vs Microdata (Pick married the secretary and former girlfriend of
Don Fuller, the President of Microdata)

When Pick Systems bought out Seattle OS in 1986, the deal was: 1) Pick would
put up a $1M letter of credit with IBM so we could get product shipped; 2)
Put $1M into our bank account to pay payroll and expenses; and 3) leave us
alone to finish the product.

In Jan or Feb of '87, the people from Pick Systems decended on us like an
invasion force, 4 of the 5 engineers quit; most of the accounting staff were
fired; Dick made himself President of the company for $19K/mo and changed
the company name to Pick Blue. By August, Seattle OS was no more, the
inventory had all moved to Orange County and my only choice was move with it
or go back to driving a cab.

Jim Whelen and IIRC several others sued for breech of contract and won.
That brought about the big layoff of May 93 when they chopped 75 of us
loose. I heard it that Dick's lawyer didn't tell him that if he fought it
himself and lost, he'd be liable for the whole amount, that the insurance
company should be the ones fighting and losing. So, supposedly, Dick sued
his lawyer. But by then I was gone and don't know for certain.

Mark Brown
CDI, Seattle OS, Pick Systems, Raining Data

"dawn" <dawnwolthuis (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote

Since I was supposedly interested in tracing the movement of the
languages and data model, I didn't take many notes on these. Seeing
how many, uh, *seasoned* professionals there on this list, I thought
I'd ask what lawsuits anyone recalls among Pick and Pick-a-like
vendors. It seems like a history worth recording.

I really have no plans for use of this information -- just curious
right now. What lawsuits does anyone know about or recall? Thanks in
advance. --dawn

Mark Brown wrote:

When Pick Systems bought out Seattle OS in 1986, the deal was: 1) Pick would
put up a $1M letter of credit with IBM so we could get product shipped; 2)
Put $1M into our bank account to pay payroll and expenses; and 3) leave us
alone to finish the product.

In Jan or Feb of '87, the people from Pick Systems decended on us like an
invasion force, 4 of the 5 engineers quit; most of the accounting staff were
fired; Dick made himself President of the company for $19K/mo and changed
the company name to Pick Blue. By August, Seattle OS was no more, the
inventory had all moved to Orange County and my only choice was move with it
or go back to driving a cab.

I've heard parts of this story, so it is good to get more of the
picture.

Jim Whelen and IIRC several others sued for breech of contract and won.
That brought about the big layoff of May 93 when they chopped 75 of us
loose. I heard it that Dick's lawyer didn't tell him that if he fought it
himself and lost, he'd be liable for the whole amount, that the insurance
company should be the ones fighting and losing.

I'm having trouble parsing that sentence -- could you restate this so
that I am sure to get it?

So, supposedly, Dick sued
his lawyer. But by then I was gone and don't know for certain.

Mark Brown
CDI, Seattle OS, Pick Systems, Raining Data

It sounds like you made it all the way from CDI to RD. How did CDI
become Seattle OS? I don't think I ever got the full story on that
one. I assume you are no longer with RD since they seem to have cut
almost all Pick Systems folks, right?

Thanks a bunch! --dawn

"dawn" <dawnwolthuis (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote in message
news:1133441835.891237.156050 (AT) z14g2000cwz (DOT) googlegroups.com...
Since I was supposedly interested in tracing the movement of the
languages and data model, I didn't take many notes on these. Seeing
how many, uh, *seasoned* professionals there on this list, I thought
I'd ask what lawsuits anyone recalls among Pick and Pick-a-like
vendors. It seems like a history worth recording.

I really have no plans for use of this information -- just curious
right now. What lawsuits does anyone know about or recall? Thanks in
advance. --dawn

"dawn" <dawnwolthuis (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote

Mark Brown wrote:

Jim Whelen and IIRC several others sued for breech of contract and won.
That brought about the big layoff of May 93 when they chopped 75 of us
loose. I heard it that Dick's lawyer didn't tell him that if he fought
it
himself and lost, he'd be liable for the whole amount, that the insurance
company should be the ones fighting and losing.

I'm having trouble parsing that sentence -- could you restate this so
that I am sure to get it?

If Dick had let the insurance company fight the suit and they lost, it would

have been their money. Since he didn't do that, and he lost, it was his
money. See below for more detail.

So, supposedly, Dick sued
his lawyer. But by then I was gone and don't know for certain.

Mark Brown
CDI, Seattle OS, Pick Systems, Raining Data

It sounds like you made it all the way from CDI to RD. How did CDI
become Seattle OS? I don't think I ever got the full story on that
one. I assume you are no longer with RD since they seem to have cut
almost all Pick Systems folks, right?

I got laid off again on 9/1/01. I was sitting home eating breakfast

watching the towers come down live on CNN.

A source close to the action who perfers their privacy sent me this. I post
it because it just proves there was a real person behind it all.

Addendum stuff you can post but not attribute:

During the trial, Dick was personally admonished by the judge to not leave
town. Ignoring this, Dick chose to go to Australia, infuriating the judge,
who added a cool half mil in punitive damages. Let us not forget that
"Dick" is both a verb _and_ a noun.

Dick's behavior in court, when he did appear, was arrogant to say the
least. He won no favor with the jury, who happily spanked him with severe
punitive damages of $1m.

Dick was to put the $1.5m into escrow, which he did.

(You may or may not want to repeat this next part, as there will be no
public record of it, and it can be construed as hearsay, but I was
standing there when it happened.)

One day, his assistant, Mary Carpenter was reviewing bank statements and
noticed that $50k had been withdrawn from the escrow account. Asking Dick
about it, he admitted that he had gone out to purchase a Mercedes for the
future Mrs. Pick, now referred to as the Black Widow.

Dick never wanted to admit his ruthless actions were his own fault, and
vowed to take his loss all the way to the Supreme Court. When he learned
that he would have to put _matching_ funds into the escrow account in case
he lost, he backed down, but never got over it.

His corporate lead counsel throughout this trial was Ray Ikola, who was
not only an experienced and competent trial attorney, but an engineer as
well, well adept at writing applications in Pick. Dick unsuccessfully
tried to dick Ray out of his legal fees. Ray is now a California State
judge. Dick is still dead. The Black Widow is still shopping for another
Dick.

"dawn" <dawnwolthuis (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote

Mark Brown wrote:

Mark Brown
CDI, Seattle OS, Pick Systems, Raining Data

It sounds like you made it all the way from CDI to RD. How did CDI
become Seattle OS? I don't think I ever got the full story on that
one. I assume you are no longer with RD since they seem to have cut
almost all Pick Systems folks, right?

(This part is hear-say. I wasn't there, but I was around when a lot of

substances were consumed)
Jim Whelen (whelan?) and Denny Brown sold Honeywell mainframes when the got
a great idea. They told a prespective buyer that they didn't really need to
buy a new computer, they just needed to buy TIME on one. Then they went to
an old customer and said, you're only using your computer 10 hours a day.
We'll pay you $1K/mo for the 14 hours you're not using. Then they'd sell
that time to customer B for $5K/mo. Honeywell found out and transfered them
to Alaska, so they quit and started a "facility management service" where
they'd charge you to manage your DP department. They'd take over the lease,
hire your people and give you a monthly bill.

I started working for them in 1976. They managed the DP departments for
Mazda Motors Central in Chicago, Northwest in Seattle, West in Los Angles
and South in Houston. They also managed the 99 Cent Store who had a
Microdata Reality.

About that same time, they wanted to branch out and have a division that
would sell the hardware and a division that would produce the software for
them to manage for you. They started CDI as Computer Distributors, Inc. In
those days, we were more main frame oriented and CDI tried to sell some kind
of key/tape entry systems that never did well. In 1983, with CDI almost
bankrupt, they made the deal with Pick to supply the engineering staff to
implement Pick Open Architecture on the IBM Series/1 and a shell for PC. An
ungodly big piece of heavy metal, the Series/1 could handle up to 256 users
with a megabyte of memory and a processor that was probably 4KHz. I believe
they sold around 120 of those. I know Lucky grocery stores main office had
one active as late as 1988. But CDI never made it as a company and they
laid us all off in 1985.

When IBM came out with the RT (risc-technology) machine, Jim, Denny, Gordon
Ayers and Steve Christensen re-animated CDI into Seattle OS. They hired me
back in '88 to be the virtual programmer and to write interface code for the
RT's Virtual Resource Manager, the precursor to RS6000 technology. RT went
whole hog for a while, a fast box (very expensive), you could run 128 users
at 9600 baud. But the airforce told IBM they didn't like the multiple
operating system of the RT, but they'd buy 100K units if IBM would change
that. IBM did, dropped the RT and the RS6000 was born.

Seattle OS couldn't get product to ship because they were behind in their
bills; they played some very creative accounting games but by 89 they sold
out to Pick Systems. Pick droped OA in favor of Advanced Pick, decided that
rather than being the 3rd most popular operating system in the world behind
only Windows and Unix, they'd rather position themselves as the 27th largest
database management software in the world behind everyone else.

I stayed with them as techsupport, virtual engineer, manager of continuing
engineering and senior support services engineer. Finally they laid me off
for the last time in '01.

Mark Brown wrote:

"dawn" <dawnwolthuis (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote in message
news:1133469946.719783.177930 (AT) g44g2000cwa (DOT) googlegroups.com...
Mark Brown wrote:

Mark Brown
CDI, Seattle OS, Pick Systems, Raining Data

It sounds like you made it all the way from CDI to RD. How did CDI
become Seattle OS? I don't think I ever got the full story on that
one. I assume you are no longer with RD since they seem to have cut
almost all Pick Systems folks, right?

(This part is hear-say. I wasn't there, but I was around when a lot of
substances were consumed)
Jim Whelen (whelan?) and Denny Brown sold Honeywell mainframes when the got
a great idea. They told a prespective buyer that they didn't really need to
buy a new computer, they just needed to buy TIME on one. Then they went to
an old customer and said, you're only using your computer 10 hours a day.
We'll pay you $1K/mo for the 14 hours you're not using. Then they'd sell
that time to customer B for $5K/mo. Honeywell found out and transfered them
to Alaska, so they quit and started a "facility management service" where
they'd charge you to manage your DP department. They'd take over the lease,
hire your people and give you a monthly bill.

I started working for them in 1976. They managed the DP departments for
Mazda Motors Central in Chicago, Northwest in Seattle, West in Los Angles
and South in Houston. They also managed the 99 Cent Store who had a
Microdata Reality.

About that same time, they wanted to branch out and have a division that
would sell the hardware and a division that would produce the software for
them to manage for you. They started CDI as Computer Distributors, Inc. In
those days, we were more main frame oriented and CDI tried to sell some kind
of key/tape entry systems that never did well. In 1983, with CDI almost
bankrupt, they made the deal with Pick to supply the engineering staff to
implement Pick Open Architecture on the IBM Series/1 and a shell for PC. An
ungodly big piece of heavy metal, the Series/1 could handle up to 256 users
with a megabyte of memory and a processor that was probably 4KHz. I believe
they sold around 120 of those. I know Lucky grocery stores main office had
one active as late as 1988. But CDI never made it as a company and they
laid us all off in 1985.

When IBM came out with the RT (risc-technology) machine, Jim, Denny, Gordon
Ayers and Steve Christensen re-animated CDI into Seattle OS. They hired me
back in '88 to be the virtual programmer and to write interface code for the
RT's Virtual Resource Manager, the precursor to RS6000 technology. RT went
whole hog for a while, a fast box (very expensive), you could run 128 users
at 9600 baud. But the airforce told IBM they didn't like the multiple
operating system of the RT, but they'd buy 100K units if IBM would change
that. IBM did, dropped the RT and the RS6000 was born.

Seattle OS couldn't get product to ship because they were behind in their
bills; they played some very creative accounting games but by 89 they sold
out to Pick Systems. Pick droped OA in favor of Advanced Pick, decided that
rather than being the 3rd most popular operating system in the world behind
only Windows and Unix, they'd rather position themselves as the 27th largest
database management software in the world behind everyone else.

I stayed with them as techsupport, virtual engineer, manager of continuing
engineering and senior support services engineer. Finally they laid me off
for the last time in '01.

Good story, Mark -- thanks for passing it along. I also received
stories by e-mail and I really appreciate those too (dwolt at
tincat-group dot com if others prefer that route). For those willing
to post, I suspect I'm not the only one who finds these stories
interesting.

Thanks. --dawn

With regards to the first part of your question, the orginal 'english'
written by Chandru Murti (Chandru you can correect this if incorrect - know
you are lurking out there somewhere) - who was with Dick in the original
Microdata days, and according to an orginal 'English 'Binder' English HAd
Update capabilities, but as I remember the story , it did not work well at
the time and resourses were concentrated on merely the RETREIVAL'
capability - Chandru eventually worked ona project for Ultimate where the
'UPDATE Processor' was originally implemented and later part of Advanced
Pick, and to a certain extent D3 todaye

Oldies may have additional information on this as welkl
"dawn" <dawnwolthuis (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote

I started to research the history of the MultiValue query language
because I was trying to figure out why it was so much easier to use
than SQL. I was curious why it didn't evolve into an update language.
I was/am looking into the future of data models and related languages
for query and update. When I embarked on this in 2001, I found the
stories behind the technology fascinating. One area I did not delve
into much is the area of lawsuits. There have been a flood of lawsuits
in the MultiValue world. A couple of them are:

Pick vs TRW from whom he, uh, obtained the original code
Pick vs Microdata (Pick married the secretary and former girlfriend of
Don Fuller, the President of Microdata)

and the more recent UniData lawsuits with Pacific UniData, with final
settlements during the acquisition of Informix by IBM IIRC.

I have read bits and pieces about many others such as Pick vs just
about everyone.

Since I was supposedly interested in tracing the movement of the
languages and data model, I didn't take many notes on these. Seeing
how many, uh, *seasoned* professionals there on this list, I thought
I'd ask what lawsuits anyone recalls among Pick and Pick-a-like
vendors. It seems like a history worth recording.

I really have no plans for use of this information -- just curious
right now. What lawsuits does anyone know about or recall? Thanks in
advance. --dawn

Hi Dawn
One of the really greate things about English/AQL/whatever is the fact that
it cannot update. This allows it to be used safely by even the most useless
operator.
In fact the worst thing that was ever done to Pick was the introduction of
the DELETE verb, effectively an AQL command. Only a unix revhead could have
dreamed up this disaster. It races off with nary a check in the world. If
the user forgot to call his select list then bingo it erases the entire
file. We had an excellent way of deleting items in the ED prestored command
until somebody added "did you really want to do this" and failed to allow
the question to be overridden by the prestore. I say excellent because only
people who knew what they were doing could use it.
Imagine if English could update the whole method of programming Pick would
have to be thrown out. Business rules would have to be held at the file
level. Dictionaries would have to be barred from users as they would become
THE FILE DEFINITION and lose their flexibility etc etc.
Please do not even think about it again.
Regards
Peter McMurray

"Jim" <wildcat66 (AT) hotmail (DOT) com> wrote

With regards to the first part of your question, the orginal 'english'
written by Chandru Murti (Chandru you can correect this if incorrect -
know
you are lurking out there somewhere) - who was with Dick in the original
Microdata days, and according to an orginal 'English 'Binder' English HAd
Update capabilities, but as I remember the story , it did not work well at
the time and resourses were concentrated on merely the RETREIVAL'
capability - Chandru eventually worked ona project for Ultimate where the
'UPDATE Processor' was originally implemented and later part of Advanced
Pick, and to a certain extent D3 todaye

Oldies may have additional information on this as welkl
"dawn" <dawnwolthuis (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote in message
news:1133441835.891237.156050 (AT) z14g2000cwz (DOT) googlegroups.com...
I started to research the history of the MultiValue query language
because I was trying to figure out why it was so much easier to use
than SQL. I was curious why it didn't evolve into an update language.
I was/am looking into the future of data models and related languages
for query and update. When I embarked on this in 2001, I found the
stories behind the technology fascinating. One area I did not delve
into much is the area of lawsuits. There have been a flood of lawsuits
in the MultiValue world. A couple of them are:

Pick vs TRW from whom he, uh, obtained the original code
Pick vs Microdata (Pick married the secretary and former girlfriend of
Don Fuller, the President of Microdata)

and the more recent UniData lawsuits with Pacific UniData, with final
settlements during the acquisition of Informix by IBM IIRC.

I have read bits and pieces about many others such as Pick vs just
about everyone.

Since I was supposedly interested in tracing the movement of the
languages and data model, I didn't take many notes on these. Seeing
how many, uh, *seasoned* professionals there on this list, I thought
I'd ask what lawsuits anyone recalls among Pick and Pick-a-like
vendors. It seems like a history worth recording.

I really have no plans for use of this information -- just curious
right now. What lawsuits does anyone know about or recall? Thanks in
advance. --dawn