Comment by lanman95
2 years ago
I still work with Meditech Magic, which is derived from MUMPS. Meditech was founded by Neil Pappalardo, the original developer of MUMPS. A strange system for sure, but it is incredibly fast and reliable. Since the early 2000s it has run on top of Windows Server, and uses a proprietary terminal emulator and encrypted telnet for establishing connections to the system. Magic has long been eclipsed by their newer 3-tier and web platforms, though there's still lots of Magic installations still out there.
The actual core OS is wild how little of the actual Windows OS is being "used". A full release of the MAGIC OS from Meditech is only a ~30MB ISO.
MAGIC relies on the Operating System Abstraction Layer (OSAL) to run MAGIC on top of Windows. It's almost like a stub, but when you boot the Windows box up it'll boot up, auto-log-in, and dump to a full screen OSAL console waiting for you to IPL the OS with various commands (like SCSI PLEASE to list boot devices).
Networking within OSAL (and in turn MAGIC) is performed by a protocol add-on in Windows attached to the NIC -- it itself handles the rest of TCP/IP itself in usermode once IPL'd.
I'm a former caretaker on a team that had a MAGIC system for historical data -- we moved onto 6.x from there, and then I moved on from healthcare IT at that point.