An enjoyable blog post about the history of Pick and how it all came to be, written by someone who was there at the forefront. Chandru Murthi was one of the early programmers of Pick and he knew both Richard Pick and Don Nelson, intimately.
The post is called "The Poet, the Physicist and the Immigrant". He was the titular immigrant while Don Nelson was the poet, leaving Dick Pick to be the physicist.
This will be a stream of consiousness writing of what I liked the most. The way the author writes about Dick Pick is that he was both an engineer, stupidly smart but also someone who had charisma and force of will. He talked and hyped himself into situations and would forcefully get things done. The greatest story is of him having the pick system monitor itself and reboot itself live. The disks would crash every so often due to a hardware bug but they had a software showing. They didn't say a word to the marketing people they were demoing for and Pick knew that none of them would be paying attention to the screens enough to catch it.
He also sounds like a good person as he helped Don Nelson later in life and kept him on the payroll long after he needed to.
The other thing was that I never realized that the multivalue systemw was dreamed up by Don Nelson and then implemented by Pick and he fully believed in it. It also may have been much more famous if it had academic papers and technical papers written for it. However it was a system that existed with gut feelings and a more human touch. The article mentions that relational databases really caught fire because they had those academic papers and so were something easily studied in universities. This meant that even if multivalue was better or comparable, people will learn what they are forced to learn and this is what drives optimizations.
The other big thing was Ken Simms created BASIC as the original way of changing data was that there was going to be TCL commands to do so. That sounds so interesting. The article also mentions that Ken Simms created BASIC to port a Star Trek game.
The article reads like a true California tech story and I love it for that. It makes me wish I had lived in that era of technology. Though this one isn't bad. The past simply looks far more romantic.
I love the post mortem which outlines who has passed and who is currently kicking around and what they are doing. Very much like the end credits of a movie like the sandlot. The article itself is written so lovingly.