Rob Allen wrote:
Do you call it "Reality"? I wasn't sure, so I simply have the company
name and not the product name in the poster. What do you call basic
and query?

any stories related to that project?

Wow. I didn't think of people still running pick as the OS that late.
I wonder if anyone out there is still running Pick as an OS.

That squares with my information. I'm not much of a hardware man
myself, but I included a few pieces of hardware in the poster: IBM
7090 that I believe had the first installation, the XEROX Sigma 7 where
Pick worked at UC Irvine and on which he & Simms encountered the
p-machine, Microdata's hardware which included the Intertechnique
something or other (need to consult notes), Intertechnique, which is
how Pick could market the product after splitting with Microdata, and
Pr1me because it has a place in my heart, I mean, because Prime
Information was the start of the third stream of Pick languages, the
way I have identified it.

I considered others, such as the first Intel port, but that was muddied
by the board that could be slipped into an AT. It was an Intel port,
but not a DOS port and I didn't know how to handle it. At this point,
I forget whether the first product running on Intel was from Pick
Systems or elsewhere. I also don't know who did the first DOS port -
Revelation, perhaps?

Thanks a bunch. --dawn

dawn wrote:
Well, it isn't really a product that we sell, it's just the environment
where our core applications run. Internally, we call it Reality or
CoRA; basic is Data/Basic, and the query language is English. I think
"CoRA" originated as McDonnell-Douglas' internal project name for the
Reality-on-Unix product, later named RealityX and now just Reality.
It's an acronym for "Common Reality Architecture" or something like
that.
It was known internally as "the CoRA Bridge" that would take us over to
the Unix world. When we first looked at jBASE, they had the ability to
take Data/Basic programs and turn them into C programs. At our
insistence, they added the option to go to C++ also. Then management
decided that the payoff wasn't there, so they pulled the plug on the
project and we stayed with CoRA.

Revelation and CDI-1000 were almost simultaneous DOS ports. The latter
disappeared quickly. I think CDI is the company that also did the IBM
Series/1 port. Here's another little-remembered product: in the early
80s, McDonnell-Douglas licensed Revelation, tweaked it to resemble
Reality, and sold it on PCs from Convergent Technologies. They named
it the "M-1000" system. The base OS was Convergent's CTOS, which had a
DOS emulation in which they ran Revelation, which was a Pick emulation.
Lots of chances for things to go wrong... and they did.

The first native Intel implementation I know of was the Altos 586,
which was done around 1983-84. We resold them in the now-defunct ADP
Accounting Services division; Dealer Services never sold anything but
Reality. Accounting Services had previously sold ADDS Mentors too. A
couple of years later, Pick Systems came out with their PC-XT version.
We got a copy to evaluate but didn't see it fitting our needs.

Rob Allen

Rob Allen wrote:
Interesting. I think Pr1me also bought Revelation or some derivative
thereof and turned it into PI/Open. IBM dropped support for PI/Open
earlier this year (or perhaps last year).

Thanks, Rob. Is ADP married to Reality for the forseeable future or
has the relational database trend over the past couple of decades
reared its head within ADP directions at all? --dawn

I don't work at ADP and haven't for some years, but they were pretty tied to
Reality (or CoRA as they called it)... The Operating system (Motorola based
SVR4 when I was there but looks like RedHat now) was pretty tied in with
CoRA and with the application.

I do seem to recall a couple of attempts of migrating from Reality whilst I
was at ADP - one was with jBASE - which is how I got into jBASE - I worked
for a company in the UK that was purchased in 1992 by ADP and seeing as
jBASE was UK based (Hemel Hempstead) I was chosen to "evaluate" the product.
It wasn't much of a product in those days - pretty much just a filesystem
and data-basic compiler - but the potential was obvious, and the enthusiasm
for the product from the likes of Jim (Idle), Clive (Ketteridge) and Greg
(Cooper) was infectious.

Needless to say, today I run on jBase and have done for several years..

I have to say that porting our UK product from MOE (ADDS Mentor on NCR UNIX
SVR4 Intel machines) to ADP's CoRA was one of the hardest things I've had to
do in my professional career to date. It was obviously the "wrong" thing to
do - we had already done a succesful port to jBase but politics stopped us
releasing - CoRA was finely tuned to support the ADP applications which made
life very difficult. However, ADP had (and probably still do) some *very*
talented people who worked with CoRA - they updated the compiler to support
some of the data-basic syntax in Mentor (particularly using stuff like
EXECUTE rather than PERFORM).

I seem to recall a project that ADP had to port to a Delphi front end with
an SQL based database - this I believe was not dissimilar to the project
that Reynolds and Reynolds recently canned. I also believe that this
project was still-born. I won't say that they chose the wrong products, but
maybe had the wrong people trying to implement!

I'm secretly pleased to head that a massive organisation like ADP is still
highly tied to a multi-value platform!! It kind of vindicates my position
to stay MV!

All this reminising is starting to make me feel old.... Funny thing is
that I'm not really old enough to remember back as far as I do.... It's
just that I started working with Mentor back in 1984 at the tender age of 13
(my father had started a software company which used Mentor)...

"Pick" - it just seems to get under the skin.. once you've got it, it seems
to stay with you!

Regards
Simon


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

Simon Verona wrote:
<snip>
Oh yeah -- that's how I worked on a Pr1me in the 70's -- as a mere
child. After I watched Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, then I coded ;-)

I'm a convert. I didn't see Prime Informaiton until the late 80's.
After considerable IMS / CICS / COBOL I was amazed at how productive a
team of P/I developers could be. I am not at all stuck with any
products and could jumpt to XML databases, MySQL, or anything else
right now, but I can see that nothing SQL-based is going to be as good
from the perspectives I care about (flexibility,
big-bang-for-the-buck). I'm planning to join the vast numbers of
bloggers in January. I haven't been a writer before, so we shall see
how that goes.
Cheers! --dawn

"dawn" <dawnwolthuis (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote in
news:1133555722.288357.277840 (AT) g47g2000cwa (DOT) googlegroups.com:

AFAIK, ADP owns their own "version" of Reality, which I hear gets
tweaked every now and then up in Portland. As Rob said, all new boxes
are Linux, and the application is very solid and runs very fast. On
the down side, there is still the old 32k limit, so you're limited to a
certain size when you compile/catlog.

Regards,
Joe

When CDI laid me off in 1985, I interviewed with ADP in Portland. They took
me to lunch and we talked for hours.

They wanted someone to write a "windows" style interface to the extent that
they wanted the system to "remember" what was on the screen and repaint it
on demand.

I brought code to show it could be done and after an hour at a keyboard, had
the basic save-the-data/display-the-data going. But I was asking for $40K
and they balked.

SB+ and several others have "windows" that either pop-up or fill a screen,
but when they repaint, they repaint EVERYTHING. As far as I know I'm still
the only one with "pixel" level repaint capabilities. But with the increase
of real Windows, it's pretty much "bringing you yesterdays technolgy
tomorrow."

Mark


"Joe" <avoidingspam (AT) nospam (DOT) com> wrote

Mark Brown wrote:


If we are talking screen refreshing on standard terminals, the 'green
screen' version of SB+ from about version 2.0/2.1(approx 1993/94) IIRC
had a 'smart refresh' option that would repaint _only_ the portion of
the screen that was 'damaged' (plus any function key row). For example,
if a new 'window' was displayed (regardless of size), only the screen
area consumed by that window was re-painted when that window was
destroyed.
For R83 systems (quite a few in those days), there was even an Assember
version to improve performance. This took up around 6 ABS frames, and
was installed by the user if required. There was another option that
would perform full screen refreshes, but once the 'smart refresh'
option was made available it was rather obsolete. Perhaps this is what
you are refering to.
I do not recall if SBClient did full screen refreshes, but on a PC
based windows system where easy mechanisms exist to do this kind of
thing, it probably made sense to do so.
I also think that Doug Dumitru sold/is-selling a windowing system for
R83 (and others?) that does partial screen refreshes, and has done
since (at least) the late 80's.

dave

I'm guessing (from their web site) that they've now interface reality with a
web server somehow and have written a web front end to their applications...

I'd guess that this is using home-grown middleware and extensions to
reality.

What was always ironic, in my humble opinion, is that whilst the guys at
Portland were extremely capable both as an individual and a group, ADP may
have been better served in buying off the shelf components/middleware rather
than doing it themselves. In my day, they were spending lots of time
reintegrating (or re-writing) features into their version of Reality that
was in the standard Reality release. The version of Reality that they
used was totally ADP unique in that is wasn't based solely on any version of
MDIS's Reality code but was a mish-mash of code from differing releases!

Regards
Simon
"Mark Brown" <mbrown (AT) drexelmgt (DOT) com> wrote

"Simon Verona" <nomail (AT) nomail (DOT) zzz> wrote in
news:4391bf70$0$63063$ed2e19e4 (AT) ptn-nntp-reader04 (DOT) plus.net:

Correct. The web services generally run on the same box the application
and database sits. There is now a browser-based GUI (IE-specific AFAIK)
that ties directly into the database.

Basicallly correct.

After so many years of tweaking, everything's proprietary in their
environment to the point where off-the-shelf products aren't nearly as
efficient as the "homegrown" solutions.

Regards,
Joe