Ever heard of MUMPS? Both programming language and database, it was developed in the 1960s for the Massachusetts General Hospital. The goal was to streamline the increasingly enormous timesink that information and records management had become, a problem that was certain to grow unless something was done. Far from being some historical footnote, MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System) grew to be used by a wide variety of healthcare facilities and still runs today. If you’ve never heard of it, you’re in luck because [Asianometry] has a documentary video that’ll tell you everything.

MUMPS had rough beginnings but ultimately found widespread support and use that continues to this day. As a programming language, MUMPS (also known simply as “M”) has the unusual feature of very tight integration with the database end of things. That makes sense in light of the fact that it was created to streamline the gathering, processing, and updating of medical data in a busy, multi-user healthcare environment that churned along twenty-four hours per day.

It may show its age (the term “archaic” — among others — gets used when it’s brought up) but it is extremely good at what it does and has a proven track record in the health care industry. This, combined with the fact that efforts to move to newer electronic record systems always seem to find the job harder than expected, have helped keep it relevant. Have you ever used MUMPS? Let us know in the comments!

And hey, if vintage programming languages just aren’t unusual enough for you, we have some truly strange ones for you to check out.

We can’t get enough of [Bettina Neumryn’s] videos. If you haven’t seen her, she takes old electronics magazines, finds interesting projects, and builds them. If you remember these old projects, it is nostalgic, and if you don’t remember them, you can learn a lot about basic electronics and construction techniques. This installment (see below) is an Elektor digital voltmeter and frequency counter from late 1981.

As was common in those days, you could find the PCB layouts in the magazine. In this case, there were two boards. The schematic shows that a counter and display driver chip — a 74C928 — does most of the heavy lifting for the display and the counter.

It is easy to understand how the frequency counter works. You clip the input with a pair of diodes, amplify it a bit, square it with a Schmitt trigger, and then, possibly, prescale it using a divider. The voltmeter is a little trickier: it uses a voltage divider, an op amp, and a 555 to convert the voltage to a frequency.

Of course, finding the parts for an old project can be a challenge. A well-stocked junk drawer doesn’t hurt. A PCB etching setup helps, too.

We’ve looked at her magazine rebuilds before. If you ever get the urge to tackle a project like this, you can find all the grand old magazines online.