From: gwh@elric.cs.mcgill.ca (Gene W. Homicki)
Subject: Re: MUMPS programming language (history) 
Keywords: MUMPS M 
Organization: SOCS, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1992 14:53:56 GMT

In article <1992Jul26.173923.21066@kosman.uucp> kevin@kosman.uucp (Kevin  
O'Gorman) writes:
> jc@sci.kun.nl (Jan Christiaan van Winkel (ATC)) writes:
> }In <1992Jul25.190427.9278@cs.cornell.edu> murthy@cs.cornell.edu (Chet 
>  Murthy) writes:

 [Much deleted]

MUMPS: (a little history)

	MUMPS was first developed at the Laboratory of Computer Science at 
the Massachusetts General Hospital in 1967.  MUMPS (_M_assachusettes  
_G_eneral _H_ospital _U_tility _M_ulti-_P_rogramming _S_ystem) was 
originally developed to handle the processing of string-oriented data and 
support random-access databases.
	Although MUMPS was originally developed to support medical 
applications, it is a general purpose database management system, and has 
found use in such areas as library infomation systems, debt collection 
systems, banking and accounting applications, inventaory and scheduling 
packages, and many many more non-medical applications.

	Blah, blah, blah... ;-)

More interesting stuff: (well, somewhat)  [ :-) ]

MUMPS _is_ indeed is indeed ASCII standarized. The most recent standard is 
the 1990.  There is also a propesed 1993 ANSI MUMPS standard that is close 
to completion (well, it's probably completed by now...I've been away from 
the MUMPS community for about a year) and the approval process is already 
underway.  MUMPS is very much a language that is _alive_.  There are 
constatnt changes, additions and compatibilities put into the new 
standards.

Not surprisingly, the MUMPS community voted to allow for the use of "M" 
instead of MUMPS.  (hmmm....I wonder why ;-).  The name change will be 
incorporated into the next revision on the X11.1 standard.

MUMPS programming is _great_.  It's a language that is very easy to learn, 
yet can be very powerful once it is mastered (and even before).  
Application developement time is in general much less (some people report 
50 to 60 percent) than more "traditional" languages and most code is about 
90 to 95 percent portable between the different "flavors" of MUMPS (or 
"M").  There are versions of MUMPS for MS-DOS, UNIX, VMS, and others from a 
variety of vendors such as DEC, IBM, Micronetics, DataTree, and a free 
version from UC Davis.  By the way...I've seen MUMPs systems where 32 or 
even 64 users (on character based terminals) are served by a '386 (just for 
a price per user reference - granted they had a most zippy hard disk and 
I/O).  Last I heard there were extensions being designed (or done) for 
interaction with X11, SQL, MS-Windoze and others.

The best place to get more current (and more useful ;) information is:

	MUMPS Users' Group (MUG)
	4321 Hartwick Road, Suite 100
	College Park, MD 20740
	Phone: 301-779-6555
(I don't know if they have Internet access...nor if they have external 
email).

If anyone wants more specifics of the language itself...talk to MUG, or 
send me email.  I'll be happy to answer any questions.
    

					--Gene W. Homicki
                                          gwh@cs.mcgill.ca

disclamer:  I worked in the MUMPS community for 2 years and I was a MUMPS 
fanatic...till I saw NeXTstep.  ;-)   (NeXTmail gladly accepted)