Microdata Corporation was an American

minicomputer A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a type of general-purpose computer mostly developed from the mid-1960s, built significantly smaller and sold at a much lower price than mainframe computers . By 21st century-standards however, a mini is ...

company which created the Reality product line featuring the

Pick operating system The Pick Operating System, also known as the Pick System or simply 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 processin ...

. 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 Corporation was a major American Aerospace manufacturer, 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 ...

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

Northgate Information Solutions Software Solutions, formerly Northgate Public Services, is a provider of specialist software and outsourcing services for the public sector based in the United Kingdom. It was acquired by NEC Corporation in January 2018. History Early years T ...

(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 Personal computer, PCs and the decline of the minicomputer industry, Prime was forced out of the market in the early 1990s, ...

's Prime INFORMATION 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'' is a 1982 American non-narrative documentary film directed and produced by Godfrey Reggio, featuring music by Philip Glass and cinematography by Ron Fricke. Described as an "essay in images and sound on the state of American ...

''.

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, an 8-bit microprogrammed computer first made in 1969. This computer was licensed to the French company Intertechnique 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 branch of science devoted to the study of molecular and crystalline structure and properties. The word ''crystallography'' is derived from the Ancient Greek word (; "clear ice, rock-crystal"), and (; "to write"). In J ...

and

biology Biology is the scientific study of life and living organisms. It is a broad natural science that encompasses a wide range of fields and unifying principles that explain the structure, function, growth, History of life, origin, evolution, and ...

) 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 serves as an intermediary layer situated between the central processing unit (CPU) hardware and the programmer-visible instruction set architecture of a computer. It consists of a set of hardware-level instructions ...

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 International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

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

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 Defunct computer hardware companies Defunct computer systems companies Microcomputers Software companies established in 1969 Software companies disestablished in 1983 Technology companies based in Greater Los Angeles NEC acquisitions