Archiving early MUG/MDC material

[Tom Munnecke]

I sat in on a zoom conference earlier this week with Henry Heffernan (long time MUG/MDC behind-the-scenes organizer), Wolfgang Giere (MUG- Europe), and Judy Faulker (CEO of Epic).  Needless to say, the participants were showing some effects of age in the 40+ years since the peak activity of the MDC and MUG days.  We were unable to reach Rick Marshall to join us, even though we knew he was active in this area.

We talked about the issue of collecting and archiving the materials from the era. Judy had volunteered to store the material at her facility, but expressed concerns that some might fear she might be biased about releasing the material.

I suggested that she digitize the material and we release it digitally in an open, Creative Commons license.  I suggested that we store a copy in the Internet Archive https://archive.org/ Of course, the material can be used or duplicated in whatever other form folks desire.  The most important thing is to get the material digitally archived now, for future dissemination as desired.

Judy has offered to digitized the documents and will pay Fed Ex fees for folks to ship their material.  I've offered to help "herd cats" to get the material to her, and help with any archivist organization and categorization.  I'll also be contributing a number of oral interview videos.  

Given the time frame, I think this is a good plan to collect and disseminate an archive of the early days of MUMPS and MDC.  

Please let me know if you have any thoughts, or have any material you'd like to submit.

Thanks,

Tom

[jstc...@linuxfoundation.org]

Hey Tom,

If there is any role that Linux Foundation could play in providing an archive or repo for source code and docs we’re happy to take a look at it. I don’t know Judy but have some other colleagues at Epic to discuss and coordinate.

I’m also curious if any of the archive relates to NY, IHS, Jordan or others in the community.

 

Best Regards,

Jim St.Clair

Executive Director

Linux Foundation Public Health

(228) 273-4893

www.lfph.io

Connect with me: https://calendly.com/jstclair-4

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[Augie Turano]

Valerie Harvey now a retired Professor at Robert Morris University was collecting a lot of archival material from the early DHCP days.   I have had no contact with her for a decade but Henry and I spent time at the University going over a lot of material years ago.  I had an early letter from Ted ONeil that i received from Marty Johnson and other material.  The original agenda at our first DHCP meeting in Bay Pines etc.

 Augie Turano

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[Tom Munnecke]

Thanks, Jim.  This is a very deep topic, with many issues related to open access/source/data.  The specific topic of the zoom call was the formative years of the MUMPS and Mumps Development Committee - mostly in the 1970's.  There are many more archival threads to be followed, of course, and I hope we come up with a framework for a durable archive that is not dependent on a single point of failure.  I like the goals and activity of the Internet Archive and trust Brewster Kahle and his goals, but even those archives are a single point of failure, albeit with a bit stronger bent towards durability.

I would like to extend the archive to all other threads - including what you mention, as well as Finland (who like to say that they adopted the VA software before the VA did), the Kuopio University effort to port the software to Nigeria.  Also Egypt, and others.

I didn't have access to Unix when I was doing my early work at the VA.  I did work closely with Jon Postel at ISI, who taught me a lot about scalable systems and his work with SMTP, domain Names, the RFC process, and the whole gestalt of the Internet community.  Ironically, I wrote one of the first SMTP servers for MailMan in DHCP before we had access to TCP/IP.  I replaced it in the DHCP stack with SCP which had the same interface but workable over the dorky communications tools VA had at the time (x.25 and a system called VADATS).  I found some errors in the original SMTP protocol in this way.  For what it's worth, it was designed to handle the latencies for NASA's interplanetary travel, so it could be interoperable with health care activities on the moon or Mars.  (not sure if the code is still around :). That level of generality may seemed an overshoot, but ironically, it came in handy when I visited a port of DHCP (through Finland) in Ile-Ife, Nigeria.  (Communications out of Nigeria were very difficult, and the rare phone booths had a long line of people normally shouting "hello? can you hear me?"  It turns out that the DHCP server in Finland was able to reach the Mailman site in Nigeria at night, relaying the message to my family).

We called the effort "Public Domain" which I think has morphed well into today's open source world.  VA has a huge longitudinal data base (one of my most important goals from the earliest days), which I doubt they (or anyone else) fully appreciate.

I think that there are lots of issues that we dealt with technical success that were met with political failure.  For example, we had a (functioning prototype) of interoperability between VA/DoD (requiring minimal code modification), which served as the basis of Congress requiring one of the vendors to propose a port of the DHCP software.  I learned from this that the VA and DoD don't really want interoperability - it's a turf war.

There are a lot of technical innovations in the original VA software that I think are not fully appreciated, for example, the role of the null string, the use of a single semantic domain (19 commands, 22 functions, 1 data type) controlling the entire environment, future binding (extending notions of early and late binding languges to adapting to future needs), etc. 

This is also an interesting case study in open vs. proprietary systems development.  VA folks went the open route, while Epic/Intersystems and Meditech went the proprietary route.  One look at the Forbes billionaire list shows the financial differences of the two, as well as the paucity of support for the open source community.

regarding Epic: The topic of Epic's reliance on Intersystems came up, at which time Wolfgang mentioned YottaDB, which she hadn't heard of.

[jstc...@linuxfoundation.org]

Thanks Tom, that’s a great summary. Yes, YottaDB is another great area to consider, too. I think extend to all the other threads to be comprehensive is important as well.

 

Best Regards,

Jim St.Clair

Executive Director

Linux Foundation Public Health

(228) 273-4893

www.lfph.io

Connect with me: https://calendly.com/jstclair-4

 

[Nancy Anthracite]

Tom, I assume you are aware of the role that Robert Morris University library has played in collecting materials in the past. Perhaps you can work with Valerie Powell and Rick Marshall to get them involved in this.

 

--

Nancy Anthracite

[Ed de Moel]

What's left of the MDC archives is still available at http://71.174.62.16/MDC/

Hope there is anything of use there,

Ed

[Sam Habiel]

Tom,

Has either David Whitten or Rick Marshall reached out to you? Both
have appreciable caches of old MDC material.

--Sam

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[Tom Munnecke]

I've tried to reach Dave Whitten recently via email, no response yet.
Valerie has responded to my email requests of several years back. I
finally reconnected with Rick after a month of trying.

I realize that there are a lot of good intentions behind all these
efforts, but until we get a scanned version of the material in an
openly distributable fashion, we don't really have an archive. And
posting material on a web site is not an archive.... so what we have
is a bunch of inaccessible fragments of paper documents scattered
about with individuals. This is not an archive, and access is
certainly not guaranteed over time.

If we are going to archive this material, we need to do it now. Henry
is 91 years old, Judy is 78, and none of us is getting younger. I
think that Judy's offer to digitize the material is our best hope for
getting long term access to the material.

[AYLESWORTH, MARC A CTR USAF AFMC AFRL/RIEBA]

Have you looked at http://archive.org It has Proceedings of the MUMPS User
Groups 1973 - 1978. If there are already some there people could add the
documents there so that they will be in a central archive. There a also
reference books on M in the archive also.

Marc Aylesworth

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Munnecke

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[Travis Ross]

Hi everyone,

I'm a postdoctoral fellow in informatics at Yale and the West Haven VAMC. My PhD is in history, though, and one of my current projects intersects with the larger history of computing at the VHA. I'm only doing a targeted slice of that right now (mostly concerning the CDW), but this is a very significant case study in the history of science, medicine, and technology that I'm keen to see properly documented and preserved. 

In addition to the options listed above, I'd encourage (and help) you to get these materials archived properly with the relatively new VA History Office in Dayton. They have a dedicated archivist who is keen to work on this project, too. It would be great to collect the documents for paper and/or digital preservation as necessary, but also to compile a list of people who might be willing to give oral histories related to DHCP/VistA.

Please reach out to me if you want to get involved in this and I'll be happy to find a way to facilitate. Historians of the future (and a few in the present) will thank you!

Best,

Travis

Travis E. Ross, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow

Yale Center for Medical Informatics

[Tom Munnecke]

Marc: Thanks for the tip about the MUG proceedings already in the
archive. I've also posted some of my oral history videos there, and
Ed deMoel's web site is archived on the Archive's Wayback Machine at
https://web.archive.org/web/20210510043812/https://71.174.62.16/MDC/

Travis: It would be great to see the VA History Office get involved.
I would also hope that perhaps the VA could look back at it's own
history and stop repeating it's past mistakes. As it stands, we have
a never-ending sequence of new VA administrators basically saying the
same thing, which fails, but then restarts with the next
administration. And VA/DoD sharing is even worse. We had working
VA/DoD interoperable sites in the early 1980's which were technically,
but not politically successful (the basic issue was that DoD did not
want to share with VA). But VA medical informatics has long ago been
overtaken by political, not technical considerations.

Great to see you looking at the history of the CDW. I might suggest
going back a bit further to the origins of the FileMan approach. I
have an oral history interview with Gio Wiederhold, Stanford CS
professor who inspired a lot of my early thinking about FileMan when I
was working with George Timson. Interestingly, he was also the major
professor to Larry Page at the outset of Google. Consider how well
Google has been able to make sense of today's information without
resorting to a Dewey Decimal System-like indexing system. Now look at
health care's efforts to impose a Dewey Decimal-like approach to
medical informatics (who in their right mind would consider coding to
the level of "struck by a duck"
https://www.icd10data.com/ICD10CM/Codes/V00-Y99/W50-W64/W61-/W61.62XD
as a meaningful way of trying to code a complex system - what we
called "false precision" in our early underground days)

In any case, there is a lot of "meta" thinking that went into the
early days that is being ignored by the state of the EHR in the VA
(and the industry in general. I think we were a lot closer
conceptually to the Google/Wikipedia mechanisms for sense-making than
the Dewey-Decimal-like semantic death spiral that is engulfing the EHR
industry today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSnCN-HQXvI

Any other volunteers to help out in this archive effort?

P.S. I just read that Judy Faulkner made it #64 on Forbes "100 most
important women 2021" list
https://www.forbes.com/power-women/#cca446d5e252 She is ranked ahead
of Taylor Swift and Queen Elizabeth, which is pretty good for a MUMPS
programmer.

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[Wolfgang Giere]

Tom, i wholeheartedly agree and for my material would like to accept the generous offer offer of Judy Faulkner to digitize it and yours to interview us, inlcluding Jon Diamond, Frans Witte and many other European MUMPSters.

Wolfgang

(Ex cofounder and chairman of MUG Europe and MUG Germany, longtime MDC-member, chairman of the Germen delegation at ISO)


-----Original-Nachricht-----
Betreff: Re: [Hardhats] Archiving early MUG/MDC material
Datum: 2021-12-09T18:05:51+0100
Von: "Tom Munnecke" <munn...@gmail.com>
An: "Sam Habiel" <sam.h...@gmail.com>

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