Folks, I stumbled across a video on the History of Pick and the inventer Dick (no I am not joking).
What interested me is its database structure and this even drove an operating System. the key feature is multi-value fields, just like the field for tags on our tiddlers. In this case they can also have multiple items and matching multiple values.
High level ideas re Pick and TiddlyWiki
- I could imagin co-opting tiddlywiki as a Pick database
- What if we could support development of solutions based on this idea
- What about an equivalent of the database query language to open tiddlywiki to more users, in some cases leaving the filter to experts and entusists and not for Naive users?
below is a Summary from ChatGPT just to outline Pick and perhaps trigger further reading on your part.
Summary via ChatGPT
‘‘Introduction to the Pick System’’
The Pick system is a family of database-centric environments first developed in the late 1960s by Richard Pick. Unlike modern software stacks where the operating system, the database, and the programming language are separate, Pick combined all three into a single, integrated platform. For many businesses in the 1970s–1990s, this was the everyday tool for building and running custom software.
‘‘MultiValue Data Model’’
The defining feature of Pick is its MultiValue database.
- In a typical relational database, a field holds one value.
- In Pick, a field can hold many values (separated internally by special delimiters).
- Each of those values can themselves contain sub-values, creating a natural way to represent lists and nested structures.
For example, a CUSTOMER record might store:
- One customer name
- Several phone numbers (multi-values)
- Several product purchases, each with its own quantity and price (sub-values)
This makes Pick feel surprisingly modern, since it resembles how data is now represented in JSON arrays and nested objects.
‘‘English Query Language’’
Pick also included a simple report/query language often called ENGLISH (or ACCESS). It let end-users type commands such as:
LIST CUSTOMERS NAME PHONES WITH POSTCODE = "2042"
and immediately see results. For many users, this was their first taste of self-service querying decades before SQL became mainstream.
‘‘Programming in Pick BASIC’’
The system included its own programming language, Pick BASIC (later called Data/BASIC). This language is tightly integrated with the database, so developers could easily read and write records, loop over multi-values, and generate reports. Business software such as inventory, payroll, or order processing could be written quickly and deployed to multiple users on shared terminals.
‘‘Why It Mattered’’
Pick systems were widely adopted in accounting firms, manufacturers, retailers, healthcare, and insurance companies. Entire ERP systems were built on them, and many are still in use today under the umbrella of MultiValue databases (D3, UniVerse, UniData, jBASE, Reality, OpenQM).
The ideas behind Pick—flexible records, multi-valued fields, integrated querying, and rapid application development—anticipated modern approaches like NoSQL and document databases.
‘‘Pick and TiddlyWiki’’
For TiddlyWiki users, the Pick story feels familiar:
- Both blur the line between data and application.
- Both emphasize records with flexible fields instead of rigid schemas.
- Both empower users to write their own queries and scripts without needing a separate database server.
In this sense, TiddlyWiki can be seen as carrying forward some of the same spirit: a single, self-contained environment where knowledge, structure, and application logic all live together.