This is a rather personal view of the history before Caché. It is in no sense meant to compete with the excellent books from [Mike Kadow](https://community.intersystems.com/user/mike-kadow) discussed in an earlier article. We have different histories and so this is meant to create a different perspective of the past. The whole story started in 1966 at **MGH** (Mass.General Hospital) on a **PDP-7** Ser.#103 with 8K of memory (18-bit words) [ _today = 18K byte _] as a spare system.
"Serial Number 103 - was located in the basement of the now demolished Thayer Building,
currently [2014] the site of the Cox Cancer Center at MGH."
"Neil Papparlardo and Curt Marble under the guidance of Octo Barnett developed and released
the initial software on this machine."
They named it MUMPS. (source)
PDP-7
The language itself was rather close to old-style Basic. But there were remarkable improvements over other programming languages: * The **big idea** was to store and retrieve persistent data without the need to deal with a file system. This was an enormous step forward at that time compared to other systems where storing and reading persistent data could easily take 30%+ of your available memory and no idea if sorting, indexing, .... * No strong data types anymore or data types imposed by names (ALGOL, FORTRAN, ..) an endless source for formal errors and conversions. * Dynamic (sparse) arrays without frozen structure and pre-allocated half-empty space in memory * Indexing persistent data with variable-length structured indices (subscripts) allowing easy sorting, grouping, subgrouping,.. You may want to compare it to old code in COBOL, FORTRAN or PL/1 to estimate the dimension of that revolution. The new software took its way along fast-moving hardware development until it reached PDP-11 and was finally known as MUMPS 4b.
1978 was a remarkable year:
- InterSystems was founded by Terry Ragon
- DEC rolled out its first VAX-11 Cluster (at Carnegie Mellon ?)
- DEC completed DSM-11 (Digital Standard Mumps) :
Besides following the rather fresh standard it had new Global Module
that improved storage performance radically.
It easily outperformed any other DataBase named product by magnitudes.
The author of this Global module was a brilliant engineer with international experience: Terry Ragon.
- I myself joined DEC also in 1978 as Sales and Support Engineer for DSM-11
meeting Terry at the first support training in Maynard.