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Octo Barnett and Neil Pappalardo were also involved with MGH's planning for a Hospital Information System, obtained a backward compatible PDP-9, and began using MUMPS in the admissions cycle and laboratory test reporting.

MUMPS was then an interpreted language, yet even then, incorporated a hierarchical database file system to standardize interaction with the data.

Some aspects of MUMPS can be traced from Rand Corporation's JOSS through BBN's TELCOMP and STRINGCOMP.

The MUMPS team deliberately chose to include portability between machines as a design goal.

Another feature, not widely supported for machines of the era, in operating systems or in computer hardware, was multitasking, which was also built into the language itself.