Microdata Corporation was an American

minicomputer A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a class of smaller general purpose computers that developed in the mid-1960s and sold at a much lower price than mainframe and mid-size computers from IBM and its direct competitors. In a 1970 survey, ...

company which created the Reality product line featuring the

Pick operating system The Pick Operating System (Pick System or Pick) is a demand-paged, multi-user, virtual memory, time-sharing computer operating system based around a MultiValue database. Pick is used primarily for business data processing. It is named after one of ...

. In its history, Microdata * was taken over by its international distributor CMC Leasings (December 1969), * which in turn was taken over in 1983 by

McDonnell Douglas McDonnell Douglas was a major American aerospace manufacturing corporation and defense contractor, formed by the merger of McDonnell Aircraft and the Douglas Aircraft Company in 1967. Between then and its own merger with Boeing in 1997, it produ ...

Corporation (March 1983), * that division was spun off as McDonnell Douglas Information Systems (1993) * which became part of

Northgate Information Solutions NEC Software Solutions, formerly Northgate Public Services, is a provider of specialist software and outsourcing services for the public sector and is based in the United Kingdom. This followed its acquisition by NEC Corporation in January 201 ...

(April 2000). * which was acquired by NEC in 2018 and rebranded to NEC Software Solutions UK in 2021. The company was initially formed as a hardware company. Independently, TRW, in fulfillment of a mid-1960s US government contract to build software to track inventory, developed a database system named Generalized Information Retrieval Language System (GIRLS). As a public domain item, a developer named Richard Pick was free to use it as the basis of a subsequent work, which eventually became the

. The initial version was designed to work on hardware produced by Microdata, which introduced the combination under the name Reality in 1974. Since the software part of Reality was based on public domain work, Pick considered himself free to develop versions for other systems. A lawsuit followed: the ruling was that both Microdata and Pick could each consider themselves owners of the software. McDonnell Douglas bought Microdata but eventually sold it off. Meanwhile, Pick revised his software to make it more portable, resulting in many systems able to run what now was called the Pick Operating System. Many implementations followed:

Prime Computer Prime Computer, Inc. was a Natick, Massachusetts-based producer of minicomputers from 1972 until 1992. With the advent of PCs and the decline of the minicomputer industry, Prime was forced out of the market in the early 1990s, and by the end of ...

Prime INFORMATION A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that is not a product of two smaller natural numbers. A natural number greater than 1 that is not prime is called a composite number. For example, 5 is prime because the only ways ...

was done as far back as 1979 as a combination of FORTRAN and Assembler.

Media appearances

Microdata's headquarters building figures prominently briefly in Godfrey Reggio's 1983 film

Koyaanisqatsi ''Koyaanisqatsi'' (), also known as ''Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance'', is a 1982 American experimental film, experimental non-narrative film directed and produced by Godfrey Reggio with music composed by Philip Glass and cinematography by R ...

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ENGLISH (programming language)

One way of accessing data under some of the Pick implementations had a number of names: * ENGLISH—The data retrieval language used to produce reports with English-like sentences. * It was also called by other Pick and Pick-like implementations: :: * RECALL (Ultimate) :: * ACCESS (Pick Systems) :: * INFO/ACCESS (PRIME Information)

Microdata hardware

There were 3 computer models offered by Microdata: * Microdata 800 * Microdata 1600 * Microdata 3200 The original machine was a Microdata 800

microcomputer A microcomputer is a small, relatively inexpensive computer having a central processing unit (CPU) made out of a microprocessor. The computer also includes memory and input/output (I/O) circuitry together mounted on a printed circuit board (PC ...

first made in 1969. This computer was licensed to the French company

Intertechnique Zodiac Aerospace was a French aerospace group founded in 1896 that supplied systems and equipment for aircraft. It had around 100 sites across the globe and employed nearly 35,000 people. In October 2018, it was acquired by French aerospace an ...

who sold it in Europe under the name Multi-8. It was particularly in use in nuclear power stations, research applications (such as

crystallography Crystallography is the experimental science of determining the arrangement of atoms in crystalline solids. Crystallography is a fundamental subject in the fields of materials science and solid-state physics (condensed matter physics). The wor ...

and

biology Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary i ...

) and process control. The Microdata 1600 was an updated version of the 800 processor (commercialized under the name Multi-4 by Intertechnique). The original development of Reality was done on the Microdata 800. The first Reality system was based on the 1600 and was sold commercially in 1973. The unique feature of the early Microdata processors was that the

microcode In processor design, microcode (μcode) is a technique that interposes a layer of computer organization between the central processing unit (CPU) hardware and the programmer-visible instruction set architecture of a computer. Microcode is a laye ...

was accessible to the user and allowed the creation of custom assembler level instructions. The Reality system design made extensive use of this capability. The Microdata 3200 was developed in 1974 and was a 16 bit microprogrammed system designed to implement a high level language similar to IBM's

PL/I PL/I (Programming Language One, pronounced and sometimes written PL/1) is a procedural, imperative computer programming language developed and published by IBM. It is designed for scientific, engineering, business and system programming. I ...

language. It was designed to a more specific purpose, but still retained a great deal of flexibility in the firmware to allow for very complex microprogrammed architectures to be supported.

External links

Microdata-Alumni

Manuals

Some manuals of the Microdata 800

Some manuals of the Microdata 1600

Some manuals of the Microdata 3200

Pictures

* ttp://www.radio-astronomie.com/multi4.htm Some pictures of the Intertechnique Multi-4 clone of the Microdata 1600

References

{{NEC Corporation 1969 establishments in California 1983 disestablishments in California 1983 mergers and acquisitions American companies established in 1969 American companies disestablished in 1983 Companies based in Irvine, California Computer companies established in 1969 Computer companies disestablished in 1983 Defunct companies based in Greater Los Angeles Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct software companies of the United States Microcomputers Software companies established in 1969 Software companies disestablished in 1983 Technology companies based in Greater Los Angeles NEC acquisitions