It’s quite clear that the Uniforum show that opens in Washington tomorrow is going to be a monster, and a few of the early shows for the event are already in. The Systems Division of NCR Corp subsidiary Applied Digital Data Systems, Hauppauge, New York, is launching a concurrent implementation of Pick and Unix at UniForum this week, to run on its NCR Tower-based Mentor 7000 range of multi-user systems. ADDS claims that the new release will make it the only manufacturer to take Pick-based users into the Unix environment with no change of hardware or applications software. The new implementation offers inter-operating system commands and has a seamless interface between the two operating systems. Unix files can be accessed from Pick’s Data Basic, and Unix programs can access Pick data files. Our new product offers approximately 600% greater performance and communications compared with a system that only emulates Pick under Unix, said ADDS director of marketing Edward Grondahl. ADDS has co-operated with its parent NCR over the project, first mooted way back in 1987, and is using its Mentor version of Pick, running over 3,300 applications, alongside NCR’s implementation of Unix System V.3, including networking support – SNA, X25, TCP/IP, Ethernet and Token Ring, and software development tools – C, Cobol, Fortran, Pascal, PL/I, Basic – both areas where Pick has been notoriously weak. Pricing for it is to be revealed at the show.
