Basic/Four Corporation Model 7250 terminal

Jay West wrote: MAI had common ancestry with Microdata as did Pick. I meant that they had a related approach in that once they built up the abstract model of a basic language, file structure, etc, only a few programmers concerned themselves with the "system" and the rest were applications people who did MAI basic. Pick had their system people who concerned themselves with the Pick virtual, OS, etc, then there is the legion of Pick applications programmers who are still out doing pick database and basic, even if a large number of them don't know it. The interesting thing about the two models is that though pick was not an "open "product as in todays open source model, there were around 25 to 30 entities who had ports of pick and had people who did the system, and got more ideas than basic 4 who kept a lot of the applications and system programming internal. I don't know if MAI supports any OEMs now, and most of their current business is in the hospitatlity industry and hotels, etc. Pick is probably #2 behind DB2 or maybe DB2 and (wh)Oracle, and the largest implementation is owned by IBM (Unidata / Universe) They were one of the first users. Microdata targeted not so much the OS as much as a large version of what you see in Nuts 'n Volts today, the large OEM integrators who wanted to have a general purpose computer to do something in an overall solution. And the other contenders of the day, DEC, DG, General Automation, CA, (insert list of OEM mini companys here) didn't fill the bill. I wrote an OS we called MPS at UMR that ran on the 1600 you bought. I used it at microdata for my own amusement for a couple of years, then they started using it to support 1621 programming, since all their hardware diagnostics were written in 1621 assembler, and I of course had thoughtfully ported them all to run under MPS for both the assembly and debugging. They had been using tty (TOS) and either cross assembly, or later used a debugger that talked to port 0 of a reality system. the parentage of the Microdata is interesting because you not only have the OS but the firmware to deal with. The first firmware that was written ran on the 800 hardware and was called the 810. The 800 firmware would run with minor tweaks on the 1600, so the 810 became the 1610. there were various extra instructions added, and there was firmware called 811, 812, 813, and 821, all of which had 1600 counterparts. Someone at some later date rewrote the 821 and added some stuff and came up with the 1630 which had enough stuff in it to not have an 800 version. The 810 firmware was modeled similar to the Data Machines 520, and have ex Data Machines engineers involved in the design, hence the commonality. Some time early on, Dick Pick and Chandru Murthi were shopping for a platform to take the GIRLS database off the mainframe onto, and thru Alan Shapiro, and Max Malone at microdata came up with using the 800. If I am not mistaken, Republic Data (a tiny weird divison of Republic Steel I think) contracted and they built up several 800's with 4k of memory, 1 8 way, and a 5mb disk and a tape drive to run 8 tty's on an 800. Not bad if you think 1972 and the amount of hardwre involved. it was reality 1.0 and had major problems, but was developed over several years and morphs into the 1600 and Reality. Basic 4 at some point, in the early 70's took a version of the 810 as near as I can tell, and modified it to run a mixture of the 810 assembly, and a compiled basic with multi user enhancements. The 810 ..thru 1630 were all classic "single user" systems, and had poor architecures for multi users, but was good for running dedicated systems. Basic 4 cleaned up things to allow for general purpose timeshareing and took off from there. At various times, Microdata sold systems to GTE that ran 1621, and several other companies. ADP bought a lot of reality systems and probably is the real money engine that made pick, and at one time or another accounted for probaby as much as 80% of the reality sales for microdata, and therefor also for pick early on. I know of oem systems that microdata sold that ran Harris firmware, which was a cpu that Harris had developed. There was hardware to allow the 1600 to run harris I/O as well as a control panel that matched the harris cpu front panel, but was driven by firmware. Another vendor bought and used 1600's running Varian Data Machines 620's. I don't know if anyone ever used it commercially, but there was an 1130 emulation that ran, though I only ever saw the firmware. I never did see any software that ran on it, so I don't know if it as more than an exercise by the author, Cliff Myers. He wrote it while at Purdue, on a system they had in their computer science department. I know of Purdue, UMR, and University of Southwestern Lousianna (USL) that had Microdata machines. The later had a 3200 or 32s and that machine is at the CHM, according to Al Kossow. So the OS question takes a bit to answer. Microdata officially only ever supported an assembly kit that you could run from tty's for the 1600. That was the reason we wrote our Disk OS, MPS but it never was officially acknowleged by Microdata as an "OS". the main system was Reality, once it took hold and the OEM sales sort of withered. Also Microdata had pursued a business model of "one stop buy everything" and had invested heavily in loosing operations to manufacture OEM Tape drives, Disk drives, terminals, and small printers. Only the use of the tapes, disks and terminals made them even slightly a profit center. Very few other companies I know of bought much of anything of the Microdata peripheral line. And as the 1600 Realitys aged and microdata didn't update the peripherals, they gradually got outflanked by companies which could use cheaper and better tapes, disks and peripherals. You Jay, will remember and shudder and heave if you recall the Microdata competitor to the SMD world, the Reflex I and II. that is why they eventually lost out to Ultimate IMHO. I guess I misspoke as far as the commonality. I think that it did resemble more the old Basic you saw on the 1600 than the Fortran like Data BAsic that pick eventually supported. Pick's basic resembled a sort of a Pascal with very bad design choices than a Basic language. things like "let" was tolerated, but not required, and the syntax gradually drifted towards procedural languages from the basic model. Internally Basic 4 started out with a 1621 like firmware which ran the OS in 32k (lower half of mem) and swapped multi users into the upper 32k of a 64K 1600. It had a very bad 32k addressing design bug (the designers used bit 15 of a 16 bit pointer to include the X (index) in the address math in some cases, which poisoned it for any addressing, hence only 32k jumps, unless you give up X. I think the nova did something like that as well, but had a better way to do 64k or > 32k object than the 1621 or 1630 did. Later versions got away from this start, but preserved the business basic source. is that the microprocessor version, or is it one of the bigger reality machines? don't recall right now. I left about when they came out with the Sequel, and called it the M9000 (6000-8000 were reality 3.0 and reality 4.0, so reality 5.0 ran on the 9000). after Microdata was merged with the CMC mob, and they came out with things like the Spirit, I lost track of all the model numbers, etc. But the M1000 was a box oem'ed from Convergent technologies that microdata wedged a modifed version of REvelation onto. Really didnt do much but modify the basic compiler to accept some crap, and make it run on the Convergent Dos I think. Convergent also ran a Unix, but microdata didn't buy that one. I think they also ran on the X86 version of Convergent, not the 68000's that they had later that scaled up into larger systems.