stimac@tymix.UUCP (Michael Stimac) (06/08/84)
<....> BTW, I always thought that MUMPS had been developed at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and that MUMPS was an acronym for Mass. University Medical Programming System (or something close to that) Michael D. Stimac
minow@decvax.UUCP (06/10/84)
MUMPS stands for Massachusetts General Hospital Universal Multiphasic Programming System. It was originally implemented as a stand-alone integrated system on the DEC PDP-15 -- subsequently on the PDP-11. The database was orgainized as a tree. At any point in the tree, you can continue searching on the current level, or search on a subsidiary level. Since MUMPS runs stand-alone, it can do a number of optimizations that are difficult -- if not impossible -- when MUMPS is layered on a standard o.s. For example, the PDP-15 and PDP-11 systems used rotational latency optimization. The "search the block for a key and descend to the first block on the next level" code was in the device driver interrupt service. Thus, PDP-15 MUMPS could search a 15-level database in two rotations of the disk. MUMPS is currently avaiable as a layered product on VAX/VMS. It uses the standard RMS-32 file system and thus can be used together with other VMS languages. For example, you can write the database stuff in MUMPS, the report generator in COBOL, etc. Martin Minow decvax!minow