🚀 go-pugleaf

mnee...@iiic.ethz.ch (Matthias Ulrich Neeracher) writes:

}In article <15...@bfmny0.BFM.COM> tn...@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff) writes:
}>Well then, here's a likely topic for discussion:
}>
}>What was the funniest and/or most memorable computer language NAME you
}>ever ran into?  No, 'c89' is ineligible, that would be too easy.  :-)

}Of course, there is also MUMPS. Don't know what this stands for, but the
}language indeed looks sick.

The MGH Utility MultiProgramm System.  MUMPS was sort of a Basic-like
language, and the actual first MUMPS system ran on a PDP-7 standalone
[that is, the only thing the OS did was timeshare MUMPS among the
various incoming TTY lines].

The was a spinoff of the "Hospital Computer Project" funded by the NIH as a
joint MGH [Massachusetts General Hospital] / BBN affair.  The actual project
started on a PDP-1b [serial #2] and later [1965] moved to a timeshared
PDP-1d.  The idea was to experiment with the use of computers to expedite /
improve patient care in hospitals [unfortunately, about a decade before
the technology would really be practical to the task, and so it mostly died.
It included things like programs to help fill out blue cross forms, programs
to keep track of who is in which bed in the hospital [a serious problem then
[maybe now, too?] is that if a patient moved to a different bed, it was a
REAL trouble getting all of his lab tests, medications, etc, to move along
with her], automating collecting lab reports and distributing them back to
the requesting doctors, etc].  

One family of programs developed was a line of interpreted algebraic
languages based on Cliff Shaw's "JOSS" language.  It was clear by the
end of the contract that running this stuff on a humongeous [at the
time] PDP-1 was not the wave of the future.  The 'successor' to the
PDP-1, the PDP-7 and PDP-9 were really quite different and code could
not be ported to them in any meaningful way, and so anything that was
to move forward would have to be rewritten.  Neil Pappalardo, then at
MGH, got a PDP-7 and implemented a dialect [and, of course,
enhancement/expansion] of one of the last of those algebraic languages,
called it MUMPS, and replaced our PDP-1 general timesharing system with
a MUMPS-only timesharing system.  This is around 1967.

Aren't you sorry you asked??  :-)

  /Bernie\