The Pick/MultiValue Story by Gus Giobbi is a great book but it really is a story about Spectrum and Gus himself more than Pick. I enjoyed reading it and it reads like an old friend telling you about their life.
Gus writes a chapter for a year since the beginning of when he got involved with Pick and it sounds like a real whirlwind of chance and luck. He starts off building a system for Dynamed and eventually runs a very large conference for Pick.
I do wish I saw more of his thoughts and ideas on why Pick died though it he does explain it but I think there is more that could be said. The biggest issue he saw was that there was no unity among the hardware vendors or the software guys. Everyone had their own names. It was cool to learn he was a key part of making MultiValue catch on.
Reading the book makes me wish I had been born a few years earlier so I could have seen the spectrum parties first hand, they sound wild.
The book also goes into the come up of Unix and how that affect Pick and I think he mentions something that Chandru also mentioned which was that Pick was very much a non-academic system and so something like SQL with its rigidity could be taught and trained on and so that drew people in.
A very fun read!