MUMPS


MUMPS, or M, is an imperative, high-level programming language with an integrated transaction processing key–value database. It was originally developed at Massachusetts General Hospital for managing patient medical records and hospital laboratory information systems.
MUMPS technology has since expanded as the predominant database for health information systems and electronic health records in the United States. MUMPS-based information systems, such as Epic Systems, provide health information services for over 78% of patients across the U.S.
A unique feature of the MUMPS technology is its integrated database language, allowing direct, high-speed read-write access to permanent disk storage.

History

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 in Boston during 1966 and 1967. It grew out of frustration, during a National Institutes of Health supported hospital information systems project at the MGH, with the development in assembly language on a time-shared PDP-1 by primary contractor Bolt, Beranek and Newman. MUMPS came out of an internal "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 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, it 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 and a radiology report entry system.
Some aspects of MUMPS can be traced from RAND Corporation's JOSS through 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 systems or in computer hardware of the era was multitasking. Although time-sharing on mainframe computers 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. 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 of 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' DEC MUMPS-11 on the PDP-11, and MEDITECH's 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 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 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.

1980s

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. For the PDP-11 series DSM-11 was released 1977. VAX DSM was sold in parallel after released 1978. Both hardware families as well as MUMPS versions were available until 1995 from DEC. The DSM-11 was ported to the Alpha in two variants: DSM for OpenVMS, and as DSM for Ultrix.
  • InterSystems with ISM on VMS, ISM-11 later M/11+ on the PDP-11 platform, M/PC on MS-DOS, M/DG on Data General, M/VM on IBM VM/CMS, and M/UX on various Unixes.
  • Greystone Technology Corporation founded 1980, with a compiled version called GT.M for AIX, HP-UX, UNIX and OpenVMS
  • DataTree Inc. with an Intel PC-based product called DTM.
  • Micronetics Design Corporation with a product line called MSM. MSM-PC, MSM/386, MS-UNIX, MSM-NT, MSM/VM fo IBM, VAX/VMS platforms and OpenVMS Alpha platforms.
  • Computer Consultants, a Houston-based company originally created CCSM on 6800, then 6809, and eventually a port to the 68000, which later became MacMUMPS, a Mac OS-based product. They also worked on the MGM MUMPS implementation. MGlobal also ported their implementation to the DOS platform. MGlobal MUMPS was the first commercial MUMPS for the IBM PC and the only implementation for the classic Mac OS.
  • Tandem Computers developed an implementation for their fault-tolerant computers.
  • IBM briefly sold a MUMPS implementation named MUMPS/VM which ran as a virtual machine on top of VM/370.
This period also saw considerable MDC activity. The second revision of the ANSI standard for MUMPS was approved on November 15, 1984.

1990s

  • On November 11, 1990, the third revision of the ANSI standard 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 was approved by ANSI, and by ISO in 1999 as , which was also . The MDC finalized a further revision to the standard in 1998 but this has not been presented to ANSI for approval.
  • In 1999 the last M Standard was approved. ISO re-affirmed this in 2020. Together with and .

    2000s

  • By 1998, 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 1993. On December 30, 1994, 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 launched a new product named Caché. This was based on their ISM product, but with influences from the other implementations. Micronetics Design Corporation, at this time #2 on the market, was acquired by InterSystems on June 21, 1998. InterSystems remains the dominant "M vendor" owning MSM, DSM, ISM, DTM and selling its IRIS Data Platform to M developers who write applications for a variety of operating systems. Also Intersystems did not use the term M anymore, neither followed the M standard.
  • Greystone Technology Corporation's GT.M implementation was sold to Sanchez Computer Associates 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.
  • During 2000, Ray Newman and others released MUMPS V1, an implementation of MUMPS similar to DSM-11. MUMPS V1 has since been ported to Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Initially only for the x86 CPU, MUMPS V1 has now been ported to the Raspberry Pi.
  • Released in April 2002 an MSM derivative called M21 is offered 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 , by Dr. Kevin O'Kane 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, founded a company called MEDITECH in 1969. They extended and built on the MUMPS language, naming the new language MIIS. Unlike InterSystems, MEDITECH no longer sells middleware, so MIIS and MAGIC are now only used internally at MEDITECH.
  • A lightweight implementation is MiniM from Eugene Karataev which halted development in 2024

    Name

The chief executive of InterSystems disliked the name MUMPS and felt that it represented a serious marketing obstacle. Thus, favoring M to some extent became identified as alignment with InterSystems. The 1990 ANSI Standard was open to both M and MUMPS and after a "world-wide" discussion in 1992 the Mumps User Groups officially changed the name to M. The dispute also reflected rivalry between organizations as to who determines the "official" name of the language.
As of 2020, the ISO still mentions both M and MUMPS as officially accepted names.
Massachusetts General Hospital registered "MUMPS" as a trademark with the USPTO on November 28, 1971, and renewed it on November 16, 1992, but let it expire on August 30, 2003.