Enjoy Juiced.GS Volume 24, Issue 3 (September 2019)

KansasFest 2019; Tom Raidna’s walkthrough of his RetroChallenge-winning MUMPS interpreter for the IIGS; a review of the Noisy Disk accessory for the Floppy Emu; an interview with Charles Mangin; a look at how Evan Wright uses interactive fiction as a teaching tool; a behind-the-scenes look at this year’s winning HackFest entry; and much, much more!

Check out this issue’s index for full details, as well as links to online resources for more related content.

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1 thought on “Enjoy Juiced.GS Volume 24, Issue 3 (September 2019)

  1. on Programming MUMPS:

    Just a small more human interest then geek tale

    Back long long ago, My father was a research scientist working at a government lab. I would rather not say which lab. Anyway, Dad had a small grant to computerize his operation and the lab admin also had a very small budget to do the same. Together they pooled resources and the result was a PDP11/40 -yes THAT long ago. For the Admin side it ran RSTS. Dad’s Lab used MUMPS. Unfortunately his grant did not cover any software development for this machine so as delivered he had bootable install tapes (yes tapes) and manuals. Fortunately he had a whiz kid intern who wrote up a database system for his needs and helped Dad learn MUMPS and the ways of the resulting system. Well the kid moved on as kids do.

    At the time I was working in a nearby city as a IBM Mainframe computer operator. On Weekends Dad would call “HELP!” when things weren’t working right and I would drive up, grab a manual or two, learn the language, the system, the database, and help out with a patch or two. It was rickety, barely served but it was the best he could do with the funding he had.

    Later, Dad bought a 386 based Compaq for home use and got a MUMPS license for it. When he retired he dumped his entire research database to mag tape. and took it with him.
    That was where the REAL problem came in: The drives that wrote that tape: scrapped. any other tape drive, antique at best. One day I got a call. Dad was busy hand transferring 7 years of research from a printout (yes he also printed it) directly into his IBM clone system. Dad was a terrible typist. He taught me all I know (Hush Tony!)

    Anyway, Our shop had recently retired all our 9 Track 1650 BPI (bits per inch) drives about a month earlier but I belonged to several forums on Usenet (including CSA2)
    I put out a call “Anyone still have a drive?”

    Soon a reply came back from a lady at the National Bureau of Standards “Yes we have one but it is going away soon” I Fed Exed that mag tape to her post haste!

    About a week later I got a email of a link to a ftp site and downloaded a 30mb file. That DB was clean and sparse and took up little room. It was his entire research data.
    -Incidentally I think that was the very last tape that drive ever read.
    (by the way: I found out later that ALL his research and many of that of his fellow researchers were totally scrapped when the department that Lab worked for changed focus. I am sure such research will be repeated sometime in the future for an additional few millions)

    I put his Data file on a spare SCSI I had and sneaker netted it to his place where we uploaded into his MUMPS system and it was like 1988 all over again! Dad was in geek paradise.

    That was many many years ago, Dad has passed, I am now retired. I moved on to other things and this is my only brush with MUMPS. -Cool system though.

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