Volume 8, Number 1, March 2000

An Interview with Ray Newman on "MUMPS VI"

For the past year, the newsgroup comp.lang.mumps has been hearing about MUMPS V1, a new version of MUMPS written in Australia. The editor finally got around to interviewing Ray Newman, the prime mover behind the new implementation:

MC: Why write a new version of MUMPS?
RN: I got tired of being ripped off - for what MUMPS cost me (approx $150k) I could buy approx 300 DSM user licences. Now, I don't have to buy "per bum" licences.

MC: What resources went into developing MUMPS V1?
RN: Four programers for about twelve months, plus two programers for a few more months (I generally round it to about 50 man months or $150k).

MC: What development is still being done?
RN: We are still fixing the more obscure bugs. I spend about a third of my time on MUMPS V1 and another of our programers, about 25% of his time. There is a long "to do" list which we are slowly working our way through. We swapped our main system over from DSM to MUMPS six weeks ago - this found a couple of bugs and will find more.

We now have, besides our main system, 14 small systems (5 to 10 jobs), one medium system (20 to 40 jobs) and mumps.org installed and running well.

MC: What development is planned?
RN: All sorts of things (besides bug fixes) - the following are representive of the things on the "to do" list (not in any order):

MC: What web capability does MUMPS V1 have?
RN: Quite good, that was an important design aim. The mumps.org web site is entirely written in MUMPS.

MC: Do you intend to port MUMPS V1 to Microsoft Operating systems?
RN: Currently NO - If we ever port it to "pay me" operating systems, it won't be free!

MC: How did you come up with the name "MUMPS V1"?
RN: I couldn't think of a better one. The first MUMPS I used was called MUMPS V4B - a nice simple name.

MC: How fast is MUMPS V1?
RN: We haven't done any specific benchmarks, but we do know that MUMPS on a 450 MH Pentium III is a huge amount faster than DSM on a poor old VAX 4000/60.

MC: How close to the MUMPS standard is MUMPS V1?
RN: Fairly close - see http://www.mumps.org for details.

MC: Are there any plans to port VistA to MUMPS V1?
RN: Yes - we are trying to set that up now, see The Hardhats web site for more information.

M Computing interviewer: Kate Schell.

Ray Newman owns and runs (with his wife Anita) One Management Australia. He also drives the MUMPS V1 project. He can be reached via email at: raymond@one.com.au.