Updating MV Family Tree

#31

dawn wrote:

Quote:

He also wrote "There was at least one microfilm retrieval system
(Kodak, maybe) that used an embedded Pick system in it." Does anyone
recall that?

Thanks. --dawn

In 1974 I left the microfilm (hence the name Microdyne) and IT business
to concentrate on manufacturing ergonomic chairs. Sometime after that
I saw a demo of that Kodak system and was very impressed with its
computer indexing and retrieval system. In 1978, when I started
looking for a comprehensive software solution for the chair company, I
recalled that Kodak system and an old friend at my erstwhile biggest
competitor revealed the secret that led me to ADDS. At about the same
time, with the help of an article about Pick in one of the computer
magazines I was able to put the Pick, Microdata and ADDS pieces
together. There are of course many things that I love about Pick but
it was especially that portability, the fact that the same system ran
on hardware from different manufacturers, that made Pick attractive to
a start-up company with big ambitions. The other thing that sticks in
my mind as a deciding factor was the Pick internal date that made the
system Y2K proof but that Y2K term was, of course, not used at that
time. Our first machine was a Microdata, mostly because the Microdata
salesman showed up. In 1984 we switched to ADDS because NCR provided
local service. To this day I still use MentorPro to look up historical
data for the chair company that I sold at the end of 1989.

Henry Keultjes
Microdyne Company
Mansfield Ohio USA

#32

Don't forget the Stratus Pick systems running over VOS. Very nice,
very fault tolerant, very expensive. Ultimate also ran on the IBM
9370. It was ok but the (Hyphas?) cables could make connectivity
a big pain.

Patrick, <;=)

dawn wrote:

Quote:

I am planning to make changes to the electronic version of the
MultiValue Family Tree poster in the coming year. The 2002 version of
the pdf is found at

http://www.tincat-group.com/mv/familytree.html

From what people have told me, the poster is very accurate, but I
believe there are some inaccuracies, I just don't know what they are.
If you have a chance to look it over and spot anything, however minor,
that appears inaccurate or misleading, I would appreciate the
information you have.

Also, there have been some changes in products or companies, including
at least jBASE and OpenQM, since this poster was developed. Any
information about the products and companies since early 2002 that
would help update this poster for today would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance for any information you can give. You may either
e-mail me at dwolt at tincat-group dot com or respond to this posting,
especially if you want input from others on the accuracy of your input.

Thanks in advance. --dawn

#33

Steve Lancour wrote:

Quote:

I worked on the customer's KAR 4000 in about 1996 and it was already
pretty old by then.

I trained a couple of the KAR developers for ADDS development back
around 1990. It was definitely just an app.

T

#34

On Tue, 29 Nov 2005 14:44:31 -0800, Tony Gravagno
<g6q3x9lu53001 (AT) sneakemail (DOT) com.invalid> wrote:

Quote:

Steve Lancour wrote:

I worked on the customer's KAR 4000 in about 1996 and it was already
pretty old by then.

I trained a couple of the KAR developers for ADDS development back
around 1990. It was definitely just an app.

T

The ADDS box (2020 or 2040?) at Kodak in Melbourne in '84/'85 was a
"standard" box - no "Kodak" stickers .... and IIRC the Kodak people
involved called themselves "ADDS distributors" which got up the nose
of Clegg Driscoll (*the* Australian distributors) a bit...... but, as
I said before, Kodak and ADDS were neighbours in NY and it all seemed
to germinate form there......

Regards,

Bruce Nichol
Talon Computer Services
ALBURY NSW Australia

http://www.taloncs.com.au

If it ain't broke, fix it until it is....

#35

Presumably this was the old Adds Mentor 2500 range machine (cream coloured
machine about 18" square footprint and approx 3 1/2 feet high).... IIRC
this used a slow Zilog Z8000 processor and had a massive 512kb of ram.
Connectivity was via a serial port board that slotted into the back of the
machine.

If this is the machine in question, then it was my first contact with
"Pick". I have fond memories of those machines - particularly using
different combinations of the 3 push buttons on the case to access the
monitor mode to reload the operating system or perform diagnostics..

It always amazes me that we could run 32 dumb screens off one of those
boxes! I used to have one sitting in our hallway - they make great
plant stands!

Regards
Simon
"Bruce Nichol" <reverse_ecurb (AT) taloncs (DOT) com.au> wrote

Quote:

On Tue, 29 Nov 2005 14:44:31 -0800, Tony Gravagno
g6q3x9lu53001 (AT) sneakemail (DOT) com.invalid> wrote:

Steve Lancour wrote:

I worked on the customer's KAR 4000 in about 1996 and it was already
pretty old by then.

I trained a couple of the KAR developers for ADDS development back
around 1990. It was definitely just an app.

T

The ADDS box (2020 or 2040?) at Kodak in Melbourne in '84/'85 was a
"standard" box - no "Kodak" stickers .... and IIRC the Kodak people
involved called themselves "ADDS distributors" which got up the nose
of Clegg Driscoll (*the* Australian distributors) a bit...... but, as
I said before, Kodak and ADDS were neighbours in NY and it all seemed
to germinate form there......

Regards,

Bruce Nichol
Talon Computer Services
ALBURY NSW Australia

http://www.taloncs.com.au

If it ain't broke, fix it until it is....

#36

"(latimerp)" <"(latimerp)"@comcast.net> wrote

Quote:

Don't forget the Stratus Pick systems running over VOS. Very nice,
very fault tolerant, very expensive. Ultimate also ran on the IBM
9370. It was ok but the (Hyphas?) cables could make connectivity
a big pain.
Oh yes, that stood for Hi Function Asynchronous, you could type a key and

expect to get it transmitted to the cpu and echoed correctly... but I guess
for the dump-entire-screen IBM folk it was like a miracle... Chandru

#37

(latimerp) wrote:

Quote:

Don't forget the Stratus Pick systems running over VOS. Very nice,
very fault tolerant, very expensive. Ultimate also ran on the IBM
9370. It was ok but the (Hyphas?) cables could make connectivity
a big pain.

Patrick, <;=)

Do you have any recollection of what Stratus named their flavors of
BASIC and the query language? I don't know how to find such
information, so if anyone has good recall or old documentation for any
of these ports or new implementations, that would be most helpful.
Thanks! --dawn

Quote:

dawn wrote:

I am planning to make changes to the electronic version of the
MultiValue Family Tree poster in the coming year. The 2002 version of
the pdf is found at

http://www.tincat-group.com/mv/familytree.html

From what people have told me, the poster is very accurate, but I
believe there are some inaccuracies, I just don't know what they are.
If you have a chance to look it over and spot anything, however minor,
that appears inaccurate or misleading, I would appreciate the
information you have.

Also, there have been some changes in products or companies, including
at least jBASE and OpenQM, since this poster was developed. Any
information about the products and companies since early 2002 that
would help update this poster for today would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance for any information you can give. You may either
e-mail me at dwolt at tincat-group dot com or respond to this posting,
especially if you want input from others on the accuracy of your input.

Thanks in advance. --dawn

#38

dawn wrote:

Quote:

(latimerp) wrote:

Don't forget the Stratus Pick systems running over VOS. Very nice,
very fault tolerant, very expensive. Ultimate also ran on the IBM
9370. It was ok but the (Hyphas?) cables could make connectivity
a big pain.

Patrick, <;=)

Do you have any recollection of what Stratus named their flavors of
BASIC and the query language? I don't know how to find such
information, so if anyone has good recall or old documentation for any
of these ports or new implementations, that would be most helpful.
Thanks! --dawn
VOS BASIC as near as I can tell.

http://ftp.stratus.com/vos/srbs/r12.0_srb.memo

Patrick <;=)

Quote:

snip

#39

(latimerp) wrote:

Quote:

dawn wrote:
(latimerp) wrote:

Don't forget the Stratus Pick systems running over VOS. Very nice,
very fault tolerant, very expensive. Ultimate also ran on the IBM
9370. It was ok but the (Hyphas?) cables could make connectivity
a big pain.

Patrick, <;=)

Do you have any recollection of what Stratus named their flavors of
BASIC and the query language? I don't know how to find such
information, so if anyone has good recall or old documentation for any
of these ports or new implementations, that would be most helpful.
Thanks! --dawn
VOS BASIC as near as I can tell.

http://ftp.stratus.com/vos/srbs/r12.0_srb.memo

Looking over the list of manuals in that document, I don't see anything
about either the query language or database. It sounds like VOS was
the O/S and from what you indicated, that Pick was running on top of
that. VOS BASIC, however, appears to be a BASIC compiler for the VOS
O/S. I don't see anything in their list of documents that gives hints
at the other Pick components, so I'm not sure if VOS BASIC is a
DataBASIC flavor or not, but I'm guessing not. I don't see any hint of
a database or query language, for example. Do you think they ported
the Pick BASIC p-code compiler into a native VOS compiler? --dawn

Quote:

Patrick <;=)

snip

#40

Simon Verona wrote:

Quote:

I worked for ADP for several years (albeit 7 years ago).. They ran a
customised version of Reality/X at the time, which they developed to suit
themselves (they updated the compiler to assist in us porting our UK
application from MOE to ADP's Reality)... In addition, they would from
time to time retrofit items from the standard version of Reality/X into
their own..

As far as I am aware, whilst they have tried to replace Reality, I believe
that it is still used today unless somebody else knows better!

Out of interest, they also did some work with jBase several years ago but
decided not to move from Reality at the time, though we did move the UK
application from ADP Reality to jBASE running on an IBM RS/6000 platform.

I work at ADP now, and we do indeed still use our own version of
Reality, running on Red Hat Linux. There hasn't been a serious attempt
to replace Reality since they stopped the jBASE project in 1996, and
there have been few if any changes made to our version of Reality since
then except for the web interface.

Our last machines that ran Reality as the OS went away in the
preparations for Y2K - we decided we weren't going to update the
software and we made the clients move to Unix. The last ones were a few
McDonnell-Douglas 'Spirit' (Motorola 68000) machines and some of our
homegrown Micro-1000 and Micro-2000 boxes - Intel 8086 machines running
Reality. Those are the only computers that ADP ever produced ourselves,
and probably the only instance of the Reality OS running on Intel
processors.The near-legendary HP 3000 Pick implementation never made it
out of the lab. Dick raved about how good it was for years, but I've
been told that it was comparable to others of its time. Dick knew that
no one would ever see it, so he could say anything he wanted.

Rob Allen
ADP Dealer Services
Portland, OR