Hackaday blog: Picking An Old Operating System

[Tony Gravagno]

https://hackaday.com/2025/08/23/picking-an-old-operating-system/

It was nice to see Chandru comment on this "hey look what we dug up from the history books" article. There aren't many comments there to note that Pick is actively developed and still sold and used. As always, it's the industry's best kept secret - and it stays that way because no one in a decision making position is interested in marketing, sales, or growth.

But ... you've heard that all from me before.

Crawling back under my mainstream rock.

T

[Optimus01010101]

I love seeing stuff like this. And it's wonderful to see Chandru still around. I have very found memories of working with him. His knowledge in the database is without equal I would say. He once wrote a series of standard A type dictionaries that would, without use of a program, get you the last value of a multivalue attribute. It worked like magic.

[Scott Ballinger]

Actually that is a pretty standard old trick, e.g.

dict invoices last.payment:

<1> = S last payment id

<2> = 85

<3> = last]payment

<8> = f85;p;s;_

<9> = L

<10> = 7

<8> = f85;p;s;_

85 = mv field of payment ids applied to this invoice

p  = pop a copy onto the stack

s  = sum

_  = swap stack 1 & 2

... this returns that last value from field 85, i.e. the last payment id in the mv list

Although now that we have the "call" processing code (attribute 8 from dict item) you can do this in a way that later, anyone will understand what is happening.

There are lots of these that exploit what were probably originally bugs;  best relegated to the dust bin as undocumented tricks.

/Scott Ballinger