I have received a number of phone calls from sales and technical personnel about a product called Cache Intersystems (from InterSystems Corporation in Cambridge, MA) They claim to have a hot "new" DB product with a new concept call multivalued fields! I asked about the ancient orgins of this product and the technical guy mentioned something about GIFTS or GIRLS I don't recall which. Any way has anyone else heard about this system and what is its relationship to Revelation if any? They claim it is compatible with Revelation.

http://cache.intersys.com/homepage.html

It's look like the web-site of "Intersystems". I think you can take a look. But I found nothing information about REVELATION on it.

GIRLS (General Information Retrieval Language System or somesuch, I'm sure Don will jump in) was a project developed during the Vietnam war to enable grunts to query helicopter part delivery schedules. After the war, one Dick Pick licensed the technology in collusion with Microdata to form Reality/Pick.

So basically they're trying to not say the dreaded P word. (Sound familiar? )

amcauley@sprezzatura.com

Sprezzatura Group

World Leaders in all things RevSoft

GIRLS (Generalized Information Retrieval Language System) was originally developed by TRW for the Army Corps of Engineers. I met Dick Pick when I was in the Navy working for NSA. Pick saw the viability of a database manager wrapped inside an operating system and acquired the commercial rights to develop it. After I left the Navy, I worked as a contractor to develop the Microdata Reality system including the query language English. There were others involved in the project including Roger Harpel, one of the original founders of Cosmos, Inc., which became Revelation Technologies. Worked with original Cosmos folks doing some of the IBM/DOS things necessary to port Pick into a 16-bit program running on top of an operating system rather than being an operating system itself, as Dick Pick tried on the original AT.

Anyway, enough history. That's where GIRLS came from.

Don Miller

C3 Inc.

Andrew .. how perceptive. Originally, Roger Harpel, etc. touted the Pick ancestry, including offering software to connect Revelation F/G to a Pick machine and move stuff to Revelation. Remember a dongle-based product which allowed AREV to dial into Pick systems? Came from Zadak or something. Strange times ;-(.

Don Miller

Thanks Don and Andrew for your review of PICK/Revelation roots. I was aware of the GIRLS connection. In fact Don, you and I discussed this at the REV conference 2 years back. I have even used the PICK/REV conversion-connectivity link recently (er… well maybe 5-years ago.) And Herman thanks for your comment on the cache web site.

However my orginal question was… Has any one ever heard of this Cache product? I was thinking it may have come out of the Prime developers based on their Cambridge Mass location. Their sales guy claims they have thousands of users. If it is similar to Revelation then there may be an opportunity there???

Cashe is a product in the MUMPS or M tradition. MUMPS was very popular in the health care community. I have talked to several MUMPS programmers over the years and have been told it is very similar to Pick Basic and does support 3D databases. I believe this company has added a optimized SQL interface. The web site for the product is www.licensetospeed.com. A free linux based version of the product is available for download.

Thanks,

You of course are correct. Now that you mention it I remember that they did tell me MUMPS not GIRLS. (Wow, where did that association come from!) I did some stuff with MUMPS a long long time ago. Is this Cache any good?

Tom

View this thread on the forum...