Whether you realize it or not, we are all a little unique. We are participants in one way or another in the only major operating system/database management system that carries the name of an individual. This has obviously had both advantages and disadvantages for the MultiValue community. On the positive side, Richard Pick as a person, while viewed by many as eccentric, was a dynamic force promoting the system. It was his personal investment both monetarily and emotionally that created and lead the early team that implemented the first commercial version of the system for Microdata. On the negative side, he was often quite out of step with the rest of the data processing community.

I spent a good part of this last week reviewing my relationship with Dick over the last two decades. Dick and I first meet just over twenty years ago. We instantly became close friends, bonded by a devotion to the system he promoted. It was 1974 and I worked for a Chicago Microdata dealership called Systems Management. SMI had just finished installing the third of what would become a large number of the new Microdata systems. They were originally a contract Cobol software house, then a turnkey business solutions provider with BasicFour. In 1973 they began selling the Microdata system. Microdata machines with the Pick system were far more efficient than the BasicFours, and they quickly subsumed many of the BasicFour software houses. There were lots and lots of little initial problems, but the Pick system would soon prove itself to be a totally new class of business systems.

Oh, Dick was never the whole story but he was the most visible leader. From the very earliest, he was one member of a large team of people who worked on the systems concepts at TRW. A fellow named Don Nelson actually had much more to do with the design than Dick, but very few people even know who he is. That's because it was Dick who saw and pursued the commercial value of the system. After leaving TRW he fought his first legal battle for the right to use the design, winning his claim that the design was in the public domain because it was developed with Government funds. Of course, later in his career he was to have half a dozen legal battles on the other side of the fence, claiming not just the work done since the TRW days, but the system concepts as well were proprietary trade secrets of Pick Systems.

Over the last twenty years, at his company variously named Pick and Associates, then Pick Computer Works, and finally Pick Systems, he was supported by quite a large team of really great people. Nearly 400 programmers, managers, marketing, sales, and support people, all believed in the system enough to invest their time and talents to help Dick perfect and advance the operating system, and well over 300 of those were summarily dropped by the rocky wayside. Since the company probably averaged about 20 people over it's 20+ years, he had close to 100 percent turnover a year, most of it in episodic 50 percent cutbacks. Dick was well liked as an individual, but he was a terribly hard person to work for. He had little use for anyone else's option about virtually all aspects of the system, from programming to support, from sales to marketing. His direction and company philosophy seemed to change with the phases of the moon.

Despite these issues, I joined Dick at Pick Systems in 1978. I felt Dick and I, along with the rest of the team had a tiger by the tail. There was no reason we couldn't become THE premier business system in the world. The software was ten or a hundred times more powerful than the cumbersome batch oriented Cobol systems I was used to in the fortune 1000 companies. On top of that it was much more efficient in hardware terms.

There was every reason to believe we could literally kick butt in the computer world. And one big reason we never would – Richard Pick himself. We had some obvious successes in the early 80's, but there were numerous knock down arguments with Dick over technical and corporate issues. I left the company in 1986 over management and direction issues that I finally realized couldn't be won. The fact the company was achieving a small fraction of its potential never seemed to bother Dick. In the end it was his company and he ran it as he saw fit.

And run it he did! Dick believed in the better mouse trap. If only he could get it right, if only he could finish the next project, then the world would finally understand how good the system truly was and drop classic mainframe and the newer PC programming in favor of his system. And he was nearly right, but for all the wrong reasons. The true power and promise of the system won hundreds of systems houses over to Pick. These companies in turn developed applications and sold nearly a hundred thousand systems over the last twenty years to others who wanted results and didn't understand or even care how those results were made to happen. These applications and the companies that spawned them are the real Pick marketplace. They were the value add that drove the economic equation in the 70's and 80's.

The 90's have turned out to be a much different story. The market has matured rapidly with the top tier hardware vendors finally realizing small systems are driving the market today. Many of the performance issues that drove Pick in the early days become non-existent when hardware speeds double every ten months. In an environment where most major and many of the minor databases now have the raw functionality of Pick, openness and standards are much more important than they were before. Also, the customers are much better educated and are more concerned about reliability, standards and how the results are achieved. Pick Systems had been too slow to react to these changes. I rejoined Pick Systems briefly in late 91 in the hope I could help Dick and the company address some of these issues. I soon discovered that little had changed in his management style when I finally became a victim of his famous "half the company must go" cutbacks.

With Mr. Pick's untimely death, one further disadvantage of having an operating system named after an individual surfaces – where do we go from here? When the name behind the system dies, does the software or the market die with him?

You undoubtedly already know my answer. Richard Pick started the phenomena known as the Pick system and those of us benefiting from this market certainly owe him a debt of gratitude, but he isn't the system. Pick Systems the company will have to deal with all the difficult issues his loss raises, and I have no doubt they will have to work through some hard times. But most of the rest of us have already done so. He was lost to the majority of the system vendors years ago. Certainly the two big market leaders, Vmark and Unidata have had no dealings with him for years and they now account for over eighty percent of the Pick market whether they call it that or not. Almost all the traditional licensees are in the same boat. Your issue as an end user is the same it was last month – is my application delivering the results my company needs, and is it ready to take on the challenges of the next ten years? The place of the Pick database in your answer should not change with Dick's death.

Despite all our personal disagreements, I will surely miss Dick Pick. His energy, his utterly unique views on life and business, and yes, his vision have driven this system. In the process, he created tens of thousands of jobs and touched and improved the lives of hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of people. He was one in a million, thank goodness. Dick I wish you well on this next part of your journey.