To celebrate its 50th anniversary, I built a faithful implementation of the 1976 MUMPS standard.
For those unfamiliar, MUMPS was born at Mass General Hospital in 1966 and ran heavily on PDP-8s and PDP-11s. It was incredibly far ahead of its time: it had a built-in hierarchical database decades before we called it 'NoSQL', allowing hospitals to do concurrent, multi-user data storage on machines with just 8K of memory.
I wanted to build an interpreter just for the original 1976 standard to preserve how it felt and worked. It includes the database, a REPL, and it's capable of running historical software from the era (like the original STARTREK application shown in the screenshot: https://github.com/rochus-keller/MUMPS/blob/main/docs/imgs/m...).
If you want to play with it, I've provided pre-compiled binaries for Windows, Mac, and Linux, along with a modern Primer to help you learn the syntax.
To celebrate its 50th anniversary, I built a faithful implementation of the 1976 MUMPS standard.
For those unfamiliar, MUMPS was born at Mass General Hospital in 1966 and ran heavily on PDP-8s and PDP-11s. It was incredibly far ahead of its time: it had a built-in hierarchical database decades before we called it 'NoSQL', allowing hospitals to do concurrent, multi-user data storage on machines with just 8K of memory.
I wanted to build an interpreter just for the original 1976 standard to preserve how it felt and worked. It includes the database, a REPL, and it's capable of running historical software from the era (like the original STARTREK application shown in the screenshot: https://github.com/rochus-keller/MUMPS/blob/main/docs/imgs/m...).
If you want to play with it, I've provided pre-compiled binaries for Windows, Mac, and Linux, along with a modern Primer to help you learn the syntax.
See https://github.com/rochus-keller/MUMPS/blob/main/Readme.md#h... and https://github.com/rochus-keller/MUMPS/blob/main/docs/MUMPS_....