Short for
Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multiprogramming System, a general-purpose
programming language developed in the late 1960s. MUMPS is similar to other procedural languages developed in this period, such as
BASIC,
FORTRAN, and
C. A MUMPS standard was approved by
ANSI in 1977.
Although MUMPS has never achieved the popularity level of other languages such as C and BASIC, there is still an active community of MUMPS developers. Since about 1993, there has been a growing trend to change the name from MUMPS to M or M-Technology.