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... Barnett identified the need to develop a language that could create multiple applications that could interconnect and remain compatible. ... Barnett created the Massachusetts Utility Multi Programming System (MUMPS) database language.
Designed as a general purpose programming language for medical records management applications, MUMPS was eventually renamed as M which evolved to become a suite of technologies. ... Based in the healthcare industry, the language was soon adopted by independent vendors for development to meet the needs and demands of other industries. ...
Life of MUMPS
The health care industry was faced with an information technology environment that was characterized by complex transaction processing applications with users in a flattened department-centric organization structure. ...
In order to meet the needs this computing environment, the MUMPS programming language was created. When MUMPS was released originally it had many similarities to early versions of Basic but was more comparable the languages C, COBOL, PASCAL, and FORTRAN.
MUMPS stood out from the other languages at the time for three main reasons:
1. The language provided a tree structured database that could easily be manipulated. ... Multiple concurrent tasks in limited memory environments on very small machines could be handled by the language. ... Global arrays, the multi-dimensional database facility, was built in to MUMPS.
By using global arrays, MUMPS allowed direct manipulation of tree or matrix structured data in a fast, efficient, and direct manner.
However, MUMPS was not without its flaws, and the imperfections of the language became more known as programmers began to use it more and more. The language was difficult to understand if detailed commentary was not provided, the screens were character based, and there were few management utilities and development tools. The name of the language also proved to be a detriment to its usage. In the late 90’s the MUMPS Users’ Group decided to change the name of the language to “M” to try and defer the association with the disease of the same name.
In the late 80’s and early 90’s many industries, such as the financial and travel industry, found themselves needing database technology that was cost efficient and was easy to deploy on multiple computer stations with different operating systems.
Approximate Word count = 1741
Approximate Pages = 7
(250 words per page double spaced)
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