Editing MUMPS (section)

=== 1960s-1970s - Genesis ===

MUMPS was developed by [[Neil Pappalardo]], [[Robert A. Greenes]], and Curt Marble in Dr. Octo Barnett's lab at the [[Massachusetts General Hospital]] (MGH) in [[Boston]] during 1966 and 1967.<ref name="MUMPS1969" /> It grew out of frustration, during a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-support hospital information systems project at the MGH, with the development in assembly language on a time-shared PDP-1 by primary contractor Bolt Beranek & Newman, Inc. (BBN).  MUMPS came out of an internal "[[Skunkworks project|skunkworks]]" project at MGH by Pappalardo, Greenes, and Marble to create an alternative development environment. As a result of initial demonstration of capabilities, Dr. Barnett's proposal to NIH in 1967 for renewal of the hospital computer project grant took the bold step of proposing that the system be built in MUMPS going forward, rather than relying on the BBN approach.  The project was funded, and serious implementation of the system in MUMPS began.

The original MUMPS system was, like [[Unix]] a few years later, built on a [[Digital Equipment Corporation|DEC]] [[PDP-7]]. Octo Barnett and Neil Pappalardo obtained a [[backward compatible]] [[PDP-9]], and began using MUMPS in the admissions cycle and laboratory test reporting. MUMPS was then an [[interpreted language]], yet even then, incorporated a [[hierarchical database]] file system to standardize interaction with the data and abstract disk operations so they were only done by the MUMPS language itself. MUMPS was also used in its earliest days in an experimental clinical progress note entry system<ref name="ProgNote1969" /> and a radiology report entry system.<ref name="Radiol1969" />

Some aspects of MUMPS can be traced from [[RAND Corporation]]'s [[JOSS]] through [[BBN Technologies|BBN]]'s [[TELCOMP]] and [[STRINGCOMP]].  The MUMPS team chose to include portability between machines as a design goal.

An advanced feature of the MUMPS language not widely supported in [[operating system]]s or in [[computer hardware]] of the era was [[computer multitasking|multitasking]]. Although [[time-sharing]] on [[mainframe computer]]s was increasingly common in systems such as [[Multics]], most mini-computers did not run parallel programs and threading was not available at all. Even on mainframes, the variant of batch processing where a program was run to completion was the most common implementation for an operating system of multi-programming.

It was a few years until Unix was developed. The lack of memory management hardware also meant that all multi-processing was fraught with the possibility that a memory pointer could change some other process. MUMPS programs do not have a standard way to refer to memory directly at all, in contrast to [[C language]], so since the multitasking was enforced by the language, not by any program written in the language it was impossible to have the risk that existed for other systems.

Dan Brevik's DEC MUMPS-15 system was adapted to a DEC [[PDP-15]], where it lived for some time. It was first installed at Health Data Management Systems of Denver in May 1971.{{r|FAQ}} The portability proved to be useful and MUMPS was awarded a government research grant, and so MUMPS was released to the public domain which was a requirement for grants. MUMPS was soon ported to a number of other systems including the popular DEC [[PDP-8]], the [[Data General Nova]] and on DEC [[PDP-11]] and the [[Artronix]] [[PC12 minicomputer]]. Word about MUMPS spread mostly through the medical community, and was in widespread use, often being locally modified for their own needs.

Versions of the MUMPS system were rewritten by technical leaders Dennis "Dan" Brevik and Paul Stylos{{r|FAQ}} of [[Digital Equipment Corporation|DEC]] in 1970 and 1971. By the early 1970s, there were many and varied implementations of MUMPS on a range of hardware platforms. Another noteworthy platform was Paul Stylos'{{r|FAQ}} DEC MUMPS-11 on the PDP-11, and [[MEDITECH]]'s [[MIIS (programming language)|MIIS]].  In the Fall of 1972, many MUMPS users attended a conference in Boston which standardized the then-fractured language, and created the '''MUMPS Users Group''' and '''MUMPS Development Committee''' (MDC) to do so. These efforts proved successful; a standard was complete by 1974, and was approved, on September 15, 1977, as [[American National Standards Institute|ANSI]] standard, X11.1-1977.  At about the same time DEC launched DSM-11 (Digital Standard MUMPS) for the PDP-11.  This quickly dominated the market, and became the reference implementation of the time. Also, [[InterSystems]] sold ISM-11 for the PDP-11 (which was identical to DSM-11).