15 Dec
2006
15 Dec
'06
6:46 p.m.
Jim wrote....
Pick also has its unique "virtual"
and "assembly code" programming that it uses, but it has been
ported to a lot of architectures since it was licensed,
I'm a tad bit familiar
with it :)
They started out on Microdata 1600's and later
their own clone
of the 1600. Next was a custom 16 bit processor they built,
and then onto several of the early microprocessors, though I
don't recall which ones. They may well have built a small
system like the one described based on the Z80 or some
8 bit cpu. I'll be interested in which processor this has.
Oh wow. I did not
know any of that, and I was around the early pick
community and developers quite a bit. Fascinating. I didn't know the tie-in
between MAI and Microdata. I knew the salesman we had for years selling pick
stuff originally came from MAI, but I had no clue MAI had that common
ancestry with Pick. They also ran on M1600's? Holy cow... small world! So...
did the company that made M1600's only target people who wanted to OEM their
boxes with their own OS? Or did they have their OWN o/s? I'd never heard of
anything on an M1600 besides Reality.
I did ask our salesman one day about MAI's systems, he said it was a
business basic, but nothing at all like Pick (he wasn't technical though).
Most strange. Thanks for the education :)
I can't wait to start restoration of my microdata M2000 :)
Jay West