 | |
| Industry | Computers |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Irvine, California, US |
| Products | Microdata hardware |
Microdata Corporation was an American minicomputer company which created the Reality product line featuring the Pick operating system.
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 Corporation (March 1983),
- that division was spun off as McDonnell Douglas Information Systems[1] (1993)
- which became part of Northgate Information Solutions (April 2000).[2]
- 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.[3]
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 Pick operating system. 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's Prime INFORMATION was done[clarification needed] as far back as 1979 as a combination of FORTRAN and Assembler.