Last night I was prompted by a link to read one of Henry Eggers' CDP
posts which makes me curious; how many programmers are still around
who at one time worked on *Native* Pick and its variants like ADDS,
Microdata, Ultimate and such?

Henry Keultjes
hbkeultjesatarthlinkdotnet
Microdyne Company
Mansfield Ohio USA

On Sep 4, 8:28*am, hbkeultjes <hbkeult... (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:
Henry,
Idle minds are the Devil's workshop. Buy another company to keep
yourself busy.
BobJ - Another idle fossil

"hbkeultjes" <hbkeultjes (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote

Not sure what "native" means in this context, but ADDS was
fundamentally different from Pick, Microdata and Ultimate.

If you're asking who wrote Pick Virtual Assembler code,
there's a few of us still around... waiting to hear why
you pose this question!

--
frosty

On Sep 4, 10:34*am, "frosty" <fros... (AT) bogus (DOT) invalid> wrote:

Microdata and then bought an ADDS 5000. ADDS gave us a tape of sorts
that converted ADDS peculiarities and by the end of the day we were
running on the ADDS box but the users could not tell the difference.
A few, does that mean two or what?

waiting to hear why you pose this question!

That post that Henry responded to seemed to indicate that the world
would end with Native Pick. Since I am still using it, perhaps I am
holding that up. However, I believe I understood, at the time, the
need to move away from Native Pick because of drivers and porting and
such. However, in the final analysis I believe that Dick Pick, had he
lived, would have joined the Open Source movement and integrated the
pieces that somebody else was writing into Native Pick. So the
quetion is, like looking at my Olivetti M20, a Z8000 machine I have
which in essence is the same machine as the ADDS 5000 but roughly 20%
of the cost in early 1980's, and running the ADDS code on that and
saying "If only ADDS had done that instead of going to the much more
expensive NCR towers and Motorola processors, how much more momentum
would the Pick market have had?.

So if there are still those who have the ability to play Pick
assembler, I would challenge them to play with versions of Pick that
never existed by replacing the Pick proprietary OS functions with Open
Source code and then we can truly wonder what might have happened, how
much more momentum would Pick have had before the IT market
fundamentally changed, rather than assuming that the path taken was
the only available path.

Henry

On 2010-09-04 16:28:26 -0400, hbkeultjes <hbkeultjes (AT) gmail (DOT) com> said:


We already know how it has turned out for at least 3 Open Source
versions of "Pick"

OpenQM has an open source Linux version

Scarlet DME is a fork of OpenQM's open source Linux version

MaVerick is a Java based implementation of Pick, though it looks like a
dead project

--
Kevin Powick

On 09/04/2010 05:28 AM, hbkeultjes wrote:
If you mean wrote BASIC (etc) apps on those systems then I'm one of
them. If you mean wrote virtual assembler on them then I'm not.
--
Cheers, SDM -- a 21st Century Schizoid Man
Systems Theory project website: http://systemstheory.net
find us on MySpace, GarageBand, Reverb Nation, Last FM, CDBaby
free MP3s of Systems Theory, Mike Dickson & Greg Amov music at
http://mikedickson.org.uk

On Sep 4, 8:24*pm, sdavmor <sdav... (AT) fakeemailaddy (DOT) com> wrote:

If you mean wrote virtual assembler on them then I'm not.

Indeed, it goes about the what I call bit-fiddler types but thnaks for
participating because you probably know as many of the assembler types
as anyone else on this list so egg them on please.

Henry

On 09/04/2010 07:27 PM, hbkeultjes wrote:
I think most of them have picked up their toys and long since gone
home (from cdp).
--
Cheers, SDM -- a 21st Century Schizoid Man
Systems Theory project website: http://systemstheory.net
find us on MySpace, GarageBand, Reverb Nation, Last FM, CDBaby
free MP3s of Systems Theory, Mike Dickson & Greg Amov music at
http://mikedickson.org.uk

On Sep 4, 10:34*am, "frosty" <fros... (AT) bogus (DOT) invalid> wrote:
I think the Pick Assembler is protected by Copyright and NDA so that
may be a dead end. A clean room version might be the answer if there
is any real interest, which I doubt.
BobJ

On Sep 4, 11:51*pm, sdavmor <sdav... (AT) fakeemailaddy (DOT) com> wrote:

And that's one of the many issues. Why use something, like Pick
Virtual Assembler when those who can use those tools are a tiny tiny
tiny fraction of those who know how to use Open Source Assembler and
high-level languages to write systems code?

Henry