[2][3] The term "Pick system" has also come to be used as the general name of all operating environments which employ this multivalued database and have some implementation of Pick/BASIC and ENGLISH/Access queries.
Data within the Pick system is organized into a hierarchical structure of accounts, dictionaries, files, and sub-files based on a hash-table model with linear probing.
This structure comprises variable-length records, fields, and sub-fields, with unique naming conventions that reflect its multivalued database characteristics.
[7] Pick was subsequently commercially released in 1973 by Microdata Corporation (and its British distributor CMC) as the Reality Operating System now supplied by Northgate Information Solutions.
In 1975, Ken Simms of Pick Systems created an implementation of Dartmouth BASIC for the Reality, with numerous syntax extensions for smart terminal interface and database operations, and it was called Data/BASIC.
[9] BYTE in 1984 stated that "Pick is simple and powerful, and it seems to be efficient and reliable, too ... because it works well as a multiuser system, it's probably the most cost-effective way to use an XT".
Subsequent ports of Pick to other platforms generally offered the same tools and capabilities for many years, usually with relatively minor improvements and simply renamed (for example, Data/BASIC became Pick/BASIC and ENGLISH became ACCESS).
Through the implementations above, and others, Pick-like systems became available as database, programming, and emulation environments running under many variants of Unix and Microsoft Windows.