> On Apr 18, 2019, at 1:56 PM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk
> <cctalk@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
