18 Apr
2019
18 Apr
'19
11:27 a.m.
On Apr 18, 2019, at 1:56 PM, Bill Gunshannon via
cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Does anyone know what the current status of this might be? I am
fairly certain Mentec didn't get this and I am not sure anyone
did. Did it merely die when everyone thought Mumps was on the
down hill slide? Was it ever really a DEC product or was it
something DEC picked up along the way after Mass General let it
out of its cage?
I'm pretty sure it was a DEC product. For that matter, it was used as the foundation
for at least one DEC product.
When I joined DEC in 1978, the group next to mine (Typeset-11) was the Assist-11 product
team. Assist-11 was a turnkey product for phone company directory assistance, allowing
names to be looked up in a large (million or so entries) database quickly. I have a clear
memory that this was built on top of DSM-11.
Curiously, a data sheet I recently saw for Assist-11 says it runs on top of RSTS. I'm
puzzled by that, because my memory is that DSM-11 is an operating system all its own, not
just a language processor running on top of a standard OS like RSTS. Perhaps it was a
separate OS at first and over time it was turned into a language subsystem on RSTS? Apart
from running into the Assist-11 team once or twice around 1978, I never had any other
exposure to that or any other aspect of DSM-11.
paul