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 Post subject: Ray Newman - Introduction
PostPosted: Tue Feb 01, 2011 3:53 pm 
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Joined: Mon Nov 01, 2010 3:33 pm
Posts: 104
Location: Australia
Real Name: Ray Newman
Began Programming in MUMPS: 01 Jul 1976
In 1973, while studying for a Batchelor of Economics at James Cook University, I did a unit titled "Miditran". This was my first introduction to IT in any form. Miditran was a limited Fortran implementation that used cards "punched" with a paper clip.

I quickly became so interested in IT that I quit my job, abandoned my degree course, obtained access to the James Cook University computer system (Digital KA10) and proceeded to teach myself programming (there being no courses available then and there). Early 1974, I was offered and accepted a job with JCU Administration as an operator and programmer with specific responsibility for running the payroll. The payroll system had been written years earlier in Fortran 2 and translated to Fortran 4 when the University acquired the KA10. During my time there I re-wrote a number of sections of the payroll system mainly to increase the speed. These modifications were written in Fortran, Cobol and PDP-10 assembler.

In 1976, I saw my first MUMPS installation (on a PDP-15) and in 1977, was offered a position in Melbourne with Digital Equipment Corporation as a software support engineer. During my time there I was responsible with two others for the support of all of Digital's PDP-11 operating systems south and/or west of Sydney.

I left Digital in late 1977 and in 1980, purchased a small system and started a Bureau in Lismore. On this system (a PDP-11/23) I used the MUMPS O/S (ISM), language and database and wrote my own applications as the need arose.

After a year, I decided that re-writing an application for each customer was neither time nor cost effective so I designed and wrote the first version of my main (long lived) application (initially called ISYS, then ONE). This was first used on our Bureau 21 April 1981 for a motor dealer in Lismore.

At about this time, Digital released the PRO-350 which was a single user system consisting of a PDP-11 processor stuffed into a PC architecture. We obtained a copy of the sources of Digital's DSM-11 and ported it to the PRO-350 making it a multi-user box (up to 5 terminals could be connected). Later we added LAT (Local Area Terminals) to both DSM-11 (before Digital did) and to our DSM-Pc implementation (allowing more than 5 terminals).

We supported DSM-Pc and our variant of DSM-11 through several versions until about 1993 by which time, I had ported the application to VAX-DSM and replaced most of our customers PDP-11 systems.

In the mid 90s, we also ported the application to MSM-Pc.

As first Digital then Micronetics disappeared, we determined that we needed our own version of MUMPS and so initiated the MUMPS V1 project in 1998.

MUMPS V1 was written by a team of four people looking after:
1. sequential I/O
2. symbol table and locking
3. database
4. the rest (including the compiler and run time interpreter)

Section 1 was written by Michael Cronk (a postgraduate student at Queensland University of Technology “QUT” at the time), 2 by Troy Smith (a graduate of QUT). Besides the overall design, I did number four and then had to also totally re-do number three. We started in late 1998 (initially on VMS), swapped to FreeBSD in early 1999 and finished (to a point of being usable) in early 2000.

During 1999, I also ported my application to MUMPS V1 so that we then ran on two platforms, DSM V6.6 on VMS and MUMPS V1 on FreeBSD.

Since then, as Digital had gone away, we have been using only MUMPS V1 on FreeBSD, Linux and currently OS/X.

At the peak, there were about 150 customers using the ONE application. This application was first used in 1981 and there are still a few using it in 2011. During this period of 30 years I was the designer and prime implementor of the ONE application. The number working on implementing, supporting, installing, training and marketing the application varied up to thirty people employed by my companies and associated companies in Australia and New Zealand.

I consider myself proficient in the languages MUMPS and C and the Operating Systems Open VMS, OS/X, FreeBSD (and linux to a lesser extent). I have written in MUMPS, BASIC (approx five varieties), C, COBOL, FORTRAN, JAVA, JAVASCRIPT, HTML, TCL, PostScript, Shell Script and the Assemblers for PDP-8, PDP-10, PDP-11, VAX and Intel x86. I have written compilers for MUMPS, SQL and our in-house Query Language.

To summarise, I have been in the IT industry for 37 years (since 1974) and I have made a living in the IT business for myself, my business partners and many employees from 1979 until recently. In developing the Application and support facilities such as Operating Systems, Language implementations, implementation design (including change management) and documentation, I have developed significant experience in and trained others in most aspects of IT.

In 2008/2009 I completed a Master of Information Technology at QUT.

Ray Newman


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 Post subject: Re: Ray Newman - Introduction
PostPosted: Mon Feb 14, 2011 5:55 pm 
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Joined: Mon Nov 01, 2010 1:58 pm
Posts: 205
Location: Seattle, Washington
Real Name: Frederick D. S. "Rick" Marshall
Began Programming in MUMPS: 15 Jun 1984
Welcome to Mumpster, Ray! Thank you so much for writing such a clear and detailed introduction.

And thank you again for letting us use MUMPS V1 as the new MUMPS Development Committee's reference implementation, and for donating mumps.org for the new MUMPS Users' Group's website.

You're a class act, Mr. Newman.

_________________
Frederick D. S. "Rick" Marshall, VISTA Expertise Network, 819 North 49th Street, Suite 203, Seattle, Washington 98103, (206) 465-5765, rick dot marshall at vistaexpertise dot net
"The hidden harmony is best." - Heraclitus of Ephesus


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 Post subject: Re: Ray Newman - Introduction
PostPosted: Mon Nov 21, 2011 7:09 pm 

Joined: Mon Nov 21, 2011 7:04 pm
Posts: 1
Real Name: Peter Quodling
Began Programming in MUMPS: 0- 0-1983
Hey there Ray, you missed some minor points, like the Pro-350 port basically being done over a weekend, as I recall. Didn't realize that you and I were at JCU at the same time.

Peter Q


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