FILECOMP(ID:2742/fil002)BBN JOSS augmented with file handling capabilities developed by Jordan Baruch of BBN for the GE Medinet system. Never implemented because 6 months into the project GE sloughed its computing operations, but highly influential on the subsequent TELCOMP-derived MUMPS Places Structures: Related languages
References: All application programs in this system are written in a high level interpretive language, a distant ancestor of which is JOSS,17 developed at the Rand Corporation in 1964. It has also been influenced by related languages such as TELCOMP and STRINGCOMP (developed by Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Inc.) and FILECOMP (specified by Medinet Division of General Electric Corp.). The MUMPS language allows the programmer to write a program, debug it, edit it, run it, and modify it concurrently at an interactive session at a console. The interpreter itself is a part of the executive system and is reentrant. The total space taken up by the time-sharing monitor, the input/output monitor, buffers, and reentrant interpreter is currently about 8,000 words of memory. The timesharing and I/O monitors have been specifically tailored to work efficiently with the interpreter. No attempt has been made to accommodate machine language user programs. in Computers and Biomedical Research 2(5) October 1969 view details Introduction The application of computers to the delivery of patient care is more a problem of "data management" than of "data processing." Although calculations and interpretation of data are often required, of much greater concern are the problems involved in the collection, communication, co-ordination, and presentation of information. As the process of delivery of medical care becomes increasingly complex, and involves increasing numbers of professional and non-professional personnel, responsibility for achieving the continuity and comprehensiveness that is essential to medical care seems to rest heavily on the development of appropriate computer-based data management systems. Such systems may further provide the primary feasible means by which quality control, auditing of the medical care process, and research into the diagnosis and treatment of disease can be achieved. These functions now are dependent on the use of the patient medical record, although they are fulfilled only to a minimal extent by it. Despite changing functions and increased demands on it, the medical record has changed little in form over the past century. Medical records possess no organization by diagnostic or therapeutic problem; notes relevant to a particular aspect of a patient's health may be accessed only by leafing through an entire volume. Terminology is not standard, data is not organized in well-defined formats, and notes are often illegible. As a consequence, the objective of using the computer for clinical data management is gaining considerable impetus. This paper will describe a number of criteria which the authors have found to be important in the design of systems for clinical data management, and a novel system which has been implemented to meet these requirements. The system to be described has been in operation for over a year. The extent to which it has proved useful has led the authors to believe that the criteria defined have general applicability for clinical data management. In the discussion to follow, the term "clinical data management system" refers to a timeshared computer system which supports on-line input, inquiry, and retrieval of clinical information from a central data base. Extract: High level programming language High level programming language One of the most time-consuming aspects of the development of information system programs involves the optimal interfacing of the system with its users in a particular application area. This requires much attention to human engineering, and repeated modification and revision of programs. The implementation of clinical data management applications has generally begun on relatively small computers. This has, in many cases, been necessary because development was a gradual process and started with limited objectives. Since high level languages have not typically been available on small machines, most programming has been done in machine language. The expense and inefficiency of writing, debugging, and modifying such programs have been serious obstacles to active research and development. A few clinical data management systems have used large general purpose computers which could provide much increased flexibility. However, the overhead of a large operating system on a major computer has often seemed excessive, because of the rather small amount of processing involved in many of these applications. Furthermore, because of the reliability requirements of a clinical data management system, modularity and duplication of hardware is desirable and often essential. Because of the expense entailed by hardware redundancy, this is typically feasible only with inexpensive, minimal equipment configurations. The MGH Utility Multi-Programming System (MUMPS) is a compact time-sharing system on a medium scale computer, dedicated to clinical data management applications. It is currently implemented on a PDP-9 (Digital Equipment Corporation) with 24,000 words of 18 bit memory and a Burroughs fixed head disk with three million characters of storage capacity. A set of terminal scanners is used to inter" face to remote devices: teletypes, buffered display scopes, line printers, card readers, and A/D converters. Both memory size and peripheral storage capacity can be expanded in the system. In the current version, 16 users may run simultaneously. All application programs in this system are written in a high-level interpretative language, a distant ancestor of which is JOSE, 1 developed at the Rand Corporation in 1964. It has also been influenced by related languages such as STRINGCOMP (developed by Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Inc.), and FILECOMP (specified by Medinet Division of General Electric Corp.). The MUMPS language allows the programmer to write a program, debug it, edit it, run it, and modify it concurrently during an interactive session at a console. The interpreter itself is a part of the executive system and is re-entrant. The total space taken up by the time-sharing monitor, the I/O monitor, buffers, and re-entrant interpreter is currently about 8,000 words of memory. The time-sharing and I/O monitors have been specifically tailored to work efficiently with the interpreter. No attempt has been made to accommodate machine language user programs. All active users are assigned partitions of core memory. in [AFIPS] Proceedings of the 1969 Fall Joint Computer Conference FJCC 35 view details |