I’ve administered this OS, which for us was used to develop images on plates for printing. It ran atop ATT UNIX and had to be “defragged” every now and again to regain contiguous space back. This process involved backing up the system to 250MB QIC tapes (twice for two sets of tapes), wiping the disks and then restoring the data from tape. This was an all-weekend process and really sucked if a tape broke, but that’s why there were two sets and scotch tape can work in a pinch when the other tape is bad.
Sounds like a dream job! How long ago was this?
Veritably, a lifetime ago.
Although I can almost guarantee someone is still doing things that way even today.
Nah, anything like that is at least a virtual tape at this point.
Considering how the entire semiconductor and storage markets shat themselves, tape might still be the cheapest per gb.
It’s the read times that kill ya
I worked for a company that still supports a critical healthcare system that runs on Rocket U2 on AIX which is an evolution of PICK.
It is so funny to hear about “critical” systems that run ancient OSes and I’ve supported my fair share of those environments. I did love AIX as well. Smitty (and F6) teaching me UNIX commands early in my career was a great help.
Was Rocket U2 still written in Pick Basic?
I think so? I think ours used UniVerse whixh used UniBasic and UniQuery. I never had to use it in anger, I was mostly focused on supporting a different thing written in VB6…
Wait, it’s an OS, but it runs on top of Unix?
Yes. Same as Windows 3.1 running atop DOS. I would say it doesn’t truly qualify as an operating system because of its dependence on a parent OS. Perhaps it’s more of an operating environment.
I see. Thanks.
Iirc some mainframe OSes, like z/OS or whatever, support running different OSes atop them.
Isn’t that in some kind of virtual machines?
I’m not familiar with those, the only “big” machines I worked with were Tandem.
Idk for sure, haven’t properly looked into it. Just read in passing that mainframes were doing this kind of thing for ages. Mainframe software generally has stuff that’s pretty weird by today’s standards, I need to read up on it sometime.
Wikipedia says regarding z/OS:
z/OS has a Workload Manager (WLM) and dispatcher which automatically manages numerous concurrently hosted units of work running in separate key-protected address spaces according to dynamically adjustable goals. This capability inherently supports multi-tenancy within a single operating system image. However, modern IBM mainframes also offer two additional levels of virtualization: LPARs and (optionally) z/VM.
It used to be the Generalized Information Retrieval Language System, but for some reason Dick didn’t like GIRLS.
Fun fact: Richard Head was the assistant Attorney General for the State of New Hampshire
He was and is also a dickhead. Now he makes money giving talks
Funny thing, where I come from pikk is slang for dick. So Dick Pick could as well be Richard Penis
I went to school with a lad called Richard Dick.
Did they call him Scroat too?
Poor guy.
Apple Computer, Inc. is named after its founder, Tim Apple.
Yeah, no, I’m not duckduckgoing that.
well i searxng it and i can confirm its real
There are GIRLS in the article!
What a POS
Not Richard, but Dick
I’m gonna need to know your familiarity with this machine, op
My DMs are open for Dick Pick images.
I’ve worked with this monstrosity, it’s not unlike other mainframe operating systems like IMB’s “System i”
I believe there’s still developers out there working on modern versions of it
https://www.rocketsoftware.com/sites/default/files/2025-09/universe-feature-release-matrix.pdf
The whole OS is essentially a really big nosql database, the filesystems are journaled and you have “files” but you also have dynamic files called “print queues” and executables are “jobs” that run queries and output into queues.
I know at least two of the major hotel chains use them still in their core network.
The best thing about it was all the functions that existed for string manipulation, since every data record was just a big string with demarcations for columns (and values and subvalues, making it technically a 4D database). You could use it to consume nearly any data format and throw together a quick-and-dirty parser in minutes. Really good for rapid proof-of-concepts, but occasionally challenging to maintain data integrity when you have all the rope in the world to hang yourself with.
I miss working with it, compared to SQL which is stupidly rigid and obnoxiously fragile in comparison.
If you say pick in norwegian, it means dick.
I worked at a place that used a Pick - D3 based ERP system for decades. They employed like the last three D3 programmers in the world (two were children of the other).
While I was there we had a major major moonshot project to replace it with a D365 solution.
(No, it didn’t improve anything, but it sure cost a lot and came with big ongoing costs)
