MUMPS - History

History

MUMPS was developed by Neil Pappalardo and colleagues in Dr. Octo Barnett's animal lab at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston during 1966 and 1967. The original MUMPS system was, like Unix a few years later, built on a spare DEC PDP-7.

Octo Barnett and Neil Pappalardo were also involved with MGH's planning for a Hospital Information System, 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. Some aspects of MUMPS can be traced from Rand Corporation's JOSS through BBN's TELCOMP and STRINGCOMP. The MUMPS team deliberately chose to include portability between machines as a design goal. Another feature, not widely supported for machines of the era, in operating systems or in computer hardware, was multitasking, which was also built into the language itself.

The portability was soon useful, as MUMPS was shortly adapted to a DEC PDP-15, where it lived for some time. MUMPS was developed with the support of a government research grant, and so MUMPS was released to the public domain (no longer a requirement for grants), and was soon ported to a number of other systems including the popular DEC PDP-8, the Data General Nova and the DEC PDP-11 and the Artronix PC12 minicomputer. Word about MUMPS spread mostly through the medical community, and by the early 1970s was in widespread use, often being locally modified for their own needs.

By the early 1970s, there were many and varied implementations of MUMPS on a range of hardware platforms. The most widespread was DEC's MUMPS-11 on the PDP-11, and MEDITECH's MIIS. In 1972, many MUMPS users attended a conference 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 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.

During the early 1980s several vendors brought MUMPS-based platforms that met the ANSI standard to market. The most significant were Digital Equipment Corporation with DSM (Digital Standard MUMPS), InterSystems with ISM (InterSystems M) on VMS and UNIX, and M/11+ on the PDP-11 platform. Other companies developed important MUMPS implementations:

• Greystone Technology Corporation with a compiled version called GT.M
• DataTree Inc. with an Intel PC based product called DTM
• Micronetics Design Corporation with a product line called MSM for UNIX and Intel PC platforms (later ported to IBM's VM operating system, VAX-VMS platforms and Alpha-VMS platforms)
• Comp Consultants (later renamed MGlobal), a Houston-based company originally created CCSM on 6800, then 6809 processors, and eventually a port to the 68000, which later became MacMUMPS, a Mac OS based product. They also worked on a the MGM MUMPS implementation. MGlobal also ported their implementation to the DOS platform where it ran as a guest operating system started from DOS.

MGlobal MUMPS was the first commercial MUMPS for the IBM PC and the only Mac implementation. DSM-11 was superseded by VAX/DSM for the VAX/VMS platform, and that was ported to the Alpha in two variants: DSM for OpenVMS, and as DSM for Ultrix.

This period also saw considerable MDC activity. The second revision of the ANSI standard for MUMPS (X11.1-1984) was approved on November 15, 1984. On November 11, 1990 the third revision of the ANSI standard (X11.1-1990) was approved. In 1992 the same standard was also adopted as ISO standard 11756-1992. Use of M as an alternative name for the language was approved around the same time. On December 8, 1995 the fourth revision of the standard (X11.1-1995) was approved by ANSI, and by ISO in 1999 as ISO 11756-1999. The MDC finalized a further revision to the standard in 1998 but this has not been presented to ANSI for approval. On 6 January 2005, and later again on 25 June 2010, ISO re-affirmed its MUMPS-related standards: ISO/IEC 11756:1999, language standard, ISO/IEC 15851:1999, Open MUMPS Interconnect and ISO/IEC 15852:1999, MUMPS Windowing Application Programmers Interface.

By 2000, the middleware vendor InterSystems had become the dominant player in the MUMPS market with the purchase of several other vendors. Initially they acquired DataTree Inc. in the early 1990s. And, on December 30, 1995, InterSystems acquired the DSM product line from DEC. InterSystems consolidated these products into a single product line, branding them, on several hardware platforms, as OpenM. In 1997, InterSystems essentially completed this consolidation by launching a unified successor named Caché. This was based on their ISM product, but with influences from the other implementations. Micronetics Design Corporation assets were also acquired by InterSystems on June 21, 1998. InterSystems remains today (2011) the dominant MUMPS vendor, selling Caché to MUMPS developers who write applications for a variety of operating systems.

Greystone Technology Corporation's GT.M implementation was sold to Sanchez Computer Associates Inc. (now part of FIS) in the mid 1990s. On November 7, 2000 Sanchez made GT.M for Linux available under the GPL license and on October 28, 2005 GT.M for OpenVMS and Tru64 UNIX were also made available under the AGPL license. GT.M continues to be available on other UNIX platforms under a traditional license.

The newest implementation of MUMPS, released in April 2002, is an MSM derivative called M21 from the Real Software Company of Rugby, UK.

There are also several open source implementations of MUMPS, including some research projects. The most notable of these is Mumps/II, by Professor Kevin O'Kane (now at the University of Northern Iowa) and students' project. Dr. O'Kane has also ported the interpreter to Mac OS X.

One of the original creators of the MUMPS language, Neil Pappalardo, early founded a company called MEDITECH. They extended and built on the MUMPS language, naming the new language MIIS (and later, another language named MAGIC). Unlike InterSystems, MEDITECH no longer sells middleware, so MIIS and MAGIC are now only used internally at MEDITECH.