Y'know, that thing about how IBM terminals are really form display machines instead of character streamers actually put something in context for me. Over a decade ago I interviewed at multiple companies whose business included adapting text-based interfaces for the Web. One was MUMPS[0], the other AS/400[1]. My thought was that they were writing shittons of text parsing code for each screen, but had I been hired and trained for the role I would have learned that HTML forms are poorly reimplemented IBM terminals and time is a flat circle.
[0] "AS/400, but it's a hacked-together line of business program turned hospital OS written when Microsoft Access was still in di-a-pers."
No, I don't know if MUMPS actually presents forms in terminal buffered I/O or not.
[1] "Microsoft Access, but it's an enterprise grade server OS written when Windows NT was still in di-a-pers."
> HTML forms are poorly reimplemented IBM terminals
In HTML forms you can SEE where the input fields are. You don't have to "PROTECT" the HTML document from warping. You don't have to hit a special key when an HTML document is larger than your screen.
And IBM manages to get credit for ALL the early computer technologies just because they're still around. Other block-oriented terminals certainly existed, and I'm glad they didn't catch-on...
you fully missed a bullet not working with MUMPS. my favorite "issue" when dealing with MUMPS was failure to run in production because a line wrapped into a second 4k "page".
that pretty much all medical records go through MUMPS scares the hell out of me after spending time moving broken web products off of MUMPS.
I'm not exactly sure what "GNU MUMPS" is. Harlan Stenn is the author of PFCS MUMPS, which is a closed source package. Maybe it was open source under that name at one point, but if that's true, I think that must have been a long time ago.
If you are looking at an open source MUMPS, the most popular are GT.M [0] and its fork YottaDB. [1] GT.M is heavily used in production by FIS Profile banking software. (FIS was originally Fidelity's banking software division, but was spun out.) Several of GT.M's core developers left FIS and started their own company to develop the YottaDB fork. Both GT.M and YottaDB are AGPL, although earlier versions of GT.M were GPLv3, and before that GPLv2.
Another open source option is Kevin O'Kane's MUMPS implementation [2] (mostly GPLv2 or LGPL). O'Kane's MUMPS is less polished, more of a research/hobby project than production-grade code. But may be a more approachable code base if you are looking to tinker with it as opposed to using it to run a bank or a hospital. The Vista EHR (developed by US Veteran Affairs) [4] can be run on GT.M, although in production I believe VA mainly uses the proprietary InterSystems Caché. [5] As software developed by the US government, the core of Vista is public domain, although there are also a number of externally modified versions distributed under various open source licenses.
[0] "AS/400, but it's a hacked-together line of business program turned hospital OS written when Microsoft Access was still in di-a-pers."
No, I don't know if MUMPS actually presents forms in terminal buffered I/O or not.
[1] "Microsoft Access, but it's an enterprise grade server OS written when Windows NT was still in di-a-pers."