Programming language
This article is about the programming language. For the disease, see Mumps . For other uses, see Mumps (disambiguation)
MUMPS ("Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System"), 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.[1]
A unique feature of the MUMPS technology is its integrated database language, allowing direct, high-speed read-write access to permanent disk storage.[2]
History [ edit ]
1960s-1970s - Genesis [ edit ]
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.[3] It grew out of frustration, during a National Institutes of Health (NIH) 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 & Newman (BBN). 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[4] and a radiology report entry system.[5]
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.
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