Digital Standard Mumps

[Paul Koning]

> 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