The Pick (or now called MultiValue) environment has been around since the 1960s.  It is an efficient, fast, stable environment with thousands of applications written in it for every vertical market.  Here is a short history of the Pick environment.

In 1964, Don Nelson, a software engineer, worked at TRW Systems in the United States and developed a query language which would enable users to produce reports and make inquiries. In 1965, Dick Pick worked alongside Nelson to develop a data model which would support the query language. This same year, Nelson published the specification for his Generalized Information Retrieval Language Language System (GIRLS). The processing model for the system was based upon a general-purpose computer using a general-purpose assembly language.  This language offered all the fundamental concepts of a computing system.

By late 1965, Nelson and Pick had completed most of the query language elements of the environment. It was then that the TRW project expanded from a largely developmental system to a live, total systems management capability when the US Army became interested in the project as a means of enabling their soldiers to monitor the parts required in the maintenance of helicopters. 

In April 1969, Pick left TRW with the intention of implementing the general-purpose computer model on a fairly low-cost computer, he continued the development work alone at the computer facilities of the UC Irvine.

In 1971, Dick Pick acquired the rights to the environment that he had developed, and in 1972, he set up Pick & Associates. The Basic language was added to the environment around 1974.

Its power and ease of use made the Pick environment very attractive to many companies who were trying to sell business solutions for use on other hardware. Microdata (later McDonnell Douglas Information Systems) marketed the first systems to ship with the Pick environment (then a full fledge operating system) (called Reality).  In 1976, Pick Systems began to license Pick to other companies including: Ultimate Corporation, ADDS Mentor, Altos, C.Itoh, Fujitsu, General Automation (R91, Power95, mv.Base, mv.Enterprise), Prime (Prime Information), Sequoia, IBM, Pertec, Hewlett-Packard, DEC, Motorola, ATT/NCR.

In 1981, Pick Systems implemented their the Pick environment on the IBM PC XT in 1981 and on the AT architecture in 1984.

In 1984 a group of Microdata VARs formed a 'consortium', which was established to develop a Pick environment under the Unix operating system. The name of the company was Vmark Software and the name of the product was Universe which is still its name today. Cosmos developed the first non-Pick operating systems implementation of a Pick database on the IBM PC platform in 1984. The product was called Revelation. The product has developed substantially since with a DOS, OS/2 and Windows 3.1 implementations. The DOS and OS/2 versions are now known as Advanced Revelation (AREV). The Windows 3.1 version is called OpenInsight (OI). Now developed by Revelation Technologies, the latest releases of AREV and OI are file compatiable.

The large number of companies producing versions of the system could have resulted in a range of incompatible dialects, but in the late 1970s Pick Systems produced a standardised form of the Pick system, known as R83 Pick, Release 83. This is the basis for all the systems which are related to Pick.

Following R83, Pick Systems proposed a number of major changes to the design of the environment and changed the name of the product to Pick OA (for Open Architecture)

During 1988, further changes were introduced to the underlying strategy of R83 and OA and the version known as AP (for Advanced Pick), was announced. AP was ported to a variety of hardware and operating system platforms including HP-UX, AIX, SCO/Unix, Linux and Windows.

In 1994, Dick Pick passed away.

In November, 1995, Pick Systems came out with the Pick database product, D3. Technical Resource Group is formed to assist organizations to migrate from older versions of Pick to D3 to take advantage of the additional features offered.

In 2000, Pick Systems was taken over by PickAx. In December 2000, the company merged with Omnis Technology Corporation and changed its name to Raining Data Corporation.