Annotation of papers/freem_history/freem_history.ms, revision 1.5
1.2 snw 1: \"
1.5 ! snw 2: \" $Id: freem_history.ms,v 1.4 2025/04/22 18:16:06 snw Exp $
1.2 snw 3: \" History of FreeM
4: \"
5: \" Copyright (C) 2025 Serena Willis
6: \"
1.3 snw 7: \" $Log: freem_history.ms,v $
1.5 ! snw 8: \" Revision 1.4 2025/04/22 18:16:06 snw
! 9: \" Remove references to FreeM as a database
! 10: \"
1.4 snw 11: \" Revision 1.3 2025/04/22 17:54:09 snw
12: \" Initial draft of FreeM History paper
13: \"
1.3 snw 14: \" Revision 1.2 2025/04/22 14:56:22 snw
15: \" Add comment header to FreeM History
1.2 snw 16: \"
1.3 snw 17: \"
18: .R1
19: database ../references.bib
20: move-punctuation
21: .R2
1.1 snw 22: .TL
23: The History of FreeM
24: .AU
25: Serena Willis
26: .AI
27: Coherent Logic Development
28: .AB
1.4 snw 29: Since 2014, The author has been the maintainer of the primary fork of the FreeM implementation of the M programming language and persistent global storage engine. In this paper, we will share some of the history of FreeM, as well as its current status and goals.
1.1 snw 30: .AE
31: .SH
32: Initial Involvement
33: .PP
34: The author's mentor in computer programming and UNIX was Larry Landis, who got involved heavily in the M/MUMPS programming language ca. 1991. Mr. Landis promoted the M language to the author from 1991 forward, and first demonstrated FreeM to her in August 1998. In 2010, the author incorporated her company, Coherent Logic Development, learned M, and began doing contract work in M through Mr. Landis's company, Fourth Watch Software.
35: .PP
1.3 snw 36: Mr. Landis was the owner of FreeM's SourceForge repository
37: .[
38: gumpSF
39: .]
40: , which had not been touched in a number of years, following Fidelity National Information Services' decision to release GT.M under a free software license. In August 2011, the author downloaded the source code for FreeM and did enough work on it to enable building and running under modern GNU/Linux systems and posted it to the mumpster.org forums.
41: .[
42: freem014
43: .]
1.1 snw 44: .PP
45: In 2014, Mr. Landis gave the author administrator access to the FreeM SourceForge repository and transferred maintainership of the project to her.
1.3 snw 46: .[
47: gumpSF
48: .]
1.1 snw 49: .SH
50: Early History
51: .PP
1.3 snw 52: FreeM was developed in Germany in the mid-1990s by a developer who went by the pseudonym \fIShalom ha-Ashkenaz\fR, whose actual identity remains unknown,
53: .[
54: freemEvolutionShalom
55: .]
56: though it is thought by some that they are a dentist who learned C and developed FreeM on their own time. Shalom developed FreeM at a time when InterSystems Corporation (the company that developed the ISM implementation of M) was acquiring the majority of its competitors and shutting them down.
57: .[
58: freemEvolutionISC
59: .]
60: . Shalom wished to provide a community-driven, open-source implementation of M as a bulwark against the growing threat of single-vendor hegemony over the M language. Its design\(emas well as some of the documentation included with the original sources\(emindicate that FreeM was originally targeted to the MS-DOS family of operating systems. It made use of a very limited subset of the C library, and included instructions for renaming the MS-DOS style 8.3 filenames in order to compile under UNIX.
61: .[
62: freemREADME
63: .]
1.5 ! snw 64: .KS
1.3 snw 65: .PP
66: At one point in FreeM's early history, Shalom ported FreeM from MS-DOS to SCO UNIX, the UNIX System V Release III-derived descendant of Microsoft XENIX, now known as SCO OpenServer\(ema platform still supported by FreeM today.
67: .[
68: portSCO
69: .]
70: This port brought support for the \fIscoansi\fR terminal type, including colors and ANSI X3.64 control mnemonics.
1.5 ! snw 71: .KE
1.1 snw 72: .SH
73: Enter the GUMP
74: .PP
1.5 ! snw 75: The \fIGeneric Universal M Project\fR was conceived by Richard F. Walters, a professor from U.C. Davis. The GUMP, following the rising popularity of object-oriented programming in the 1990s, was intended to be a toolkit allowing M implementations to be built from discrete components with a well-defined and well-specified public interface among these components. These components included the global handler (supplying the functionality of persistent global storage), and the interpreter/compiler (responsible for implementing M language commands). The components would have been able to communicate over a network, or in-process on the same host, enabling distributed computing functionality.
1.3 snw 76: .[
77: c2m
78: .]
79: .PP
80: Although the specification for the GUM interface to global handlers attained a reasonably well-specified level of completeness,
81: .[
82: gumapi
83: .]
84: and Larry Landis and others developed a mostly-complete implementation of a GUM global handler,
85: .[
86: gumpsrc
87: .]
88: none of the other envisioned components were ever completed, and specifically, the interpreter component was missing.
1.1 snw 89: .SH
90: Shalom's Gift
91: .PP
1.5 ! snw 92: In July of 1998, Shalom ha-Ashkenaz donated the FreeM source code (then known as FreeMUMPS) to the M User's Group-Deutschland (MUG-D), hoping the community would take the nascent implementation from its infancy through to a state of production-ready completeness and robustness. Shalom also placed a few conditions on his gift: a public release could not be made until a substantial set of milestones were reached. Per his conditions, the FreeMUMPS project must:
1.3 snw 93: .[
94: freemREADME
95: .]
1.1 snw 96: .IP \(bu 2
97: Implement the entirety of \fIANSI X11.1-1995\fR
98: .IP \(bu 2
99: Use Structured System Variables instead of \fIVIEW\fR commands and \fI$VIEW\fR functions
100: .IP \(bu 2
101: Raise the string size limits
102: .IP \(bu 2
103: Implement MWAPI, OMI, X11 bindings, and GKS bindings
104: .IP \(bu 2
105: Be substantially free of major bugs
106: .PP
107: Although MUG-D readily accepted the contribution of FreeMUMPS, the organization itself lacked the manpower and expertise to complete the implementation. Just as it is now, the intersection of M community members who know enough of the M language and C language to work on a project this ambitious was quite small.
108: .SH
109: Merging GUMP and FreeM
110: .PP
1.5 ! snw 111: Very shortly after the contribution of FreeMUMPS to MUG-D, Richard F. Walters and a small team of developers and administrative staff who had been working on the GUMP assumed maintainership of the FreeMUMPS source code, with Lawrence Landis managing the development efforts.
1.3 snw 112: .[
113: freemEvolutionShalom
114: .]
115: This included representatives from the \fIM Technology Association\fR (an M vendor association having several foreign branches), the \fIM Development Committee\fR (the M standards organization hosting the ANSI/ISO standards for the M language, then sponsored by the M Technology Association), and others.
116: .[
117: freemContributors
118: .]
1.5 ! snw 119: .ne 4
1.3 snw 120: The goals of this team were to:
1.1 snw 121: .IP \(bu 2
122: Meet Shalom's requirements for a public release of FreeMUMPS
123: .IP \(bu 2
124: Convert FreeMUMPS into the first interpreter component of the GUMP
125: .PP
1.5 ! snw 126: During this period, Ronald L. Fox of Diagnostic Laboratory Services in Honolulu, HI (who passed in 2010)
1.3 snw 127: .[
128: ronFoxGrave
129: .]
130: ported FreeMUMPS from SCO UNIX to Red Hat 5 and glibc-6.
131: .[
132: ronFoxPort
133: .]
134: Steve "Saintly" Zeck of the U.C. Davis Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital
135: .[
136: saintlyBio
137: .]
138: also attempted to rewrite the symbol table code to lift string size limits,
139: .[
140: saintlySymtab
141: .]
1.5 ! snw 142: David Whitten enhanced some of the implementation-specific extensions, and Lawrence Landis integrated Saintly's symbol table work.
1.3 snw 143: .PP
1.5 ! snw 144: In FreeM 0.1.0, the name of the implementation was changed from FreeMUMPS to Public Standard M, and again to Free Standard MUMPS and then FreeM when it was discovered leading up to the FreeM 0.2.0 release that the PSM acronym was already in use for Patterson & Gray's
1.3 snw 145: .[
146: mdc_implementations
147: .]
148: M implementation.
149: .[
150: Changes.GUM
151: .]
152: Dr. Walters also received the implementation ID of 49 from then secretary of the M Development Committee, Don Piccone.
153: .[
154: Changes.GUM
155: .]
1.1 snw 156: .PP
1.5 ! snw 157: One of the contributors to FreeM at this stage\(emprimarily in the area of M vendor routines\(emwas Axel Trocha, who would later maintain a private fork of FreeM.
1.3 snw 158: .[
159: trochaFork
160: .]
1.1 snw 161: .SH
162: The GT.M Free Software Release
163: .PP
164: GT.M, an acronym for \fIGreystone Technology MUMPS\fR, is an M implementation that was released by Greystone Technology in 1986. Greystone was later acquired by Sanchez Computer Associates, which was in turn acquired by Fidelity National Information Services.
1.3 snw 165: .[
166: fisSanchezAcquisition
167: .]
168: .PP
169: When GT.M was released under the GNU General Public License in 2000,
170: .[
171: gtmRelease
172: .]
1.5 ! snw 173: it seemed to many to negate the entire \fIraison d'etre\fR for FreeM, as GT.M was a well-established, robust, and high-performance M implementation with which FreeM could not then compete. Unfortunately, at this time, the GUMP and FreeM projects lost all of their momentum, and new development along these lines rapidly ceased. The final GUMP team release of FreeM was 0.5.0.
1.3 snw 174: .[
175: freem050
176: .]
177: However, Axel Trocha's private port would continue to be developed for some years.
1.1 snw 178: .SH
179: Axel Trocha's Fork
180: .PP
1.5 ! snw 181: After FreeM's momentum ceased within the primary branch of development under Richard F. Walters' leadership, Axel Trocha, an aforementioned contributor of M vendor routines and member of Dr. Walters' team, continued development on the FreeM source code. Trocha added many interesting features to the FreeM codebase, including:
1.1 snw 182: .IP \(bu 2
183: A native port to Microsoft Windows
184: .IP \(bu 2
185: Compiling FreeM as an Apache web server module, allowing FreeM to be used easily for web development
186: .IP \(bu 2
187: The ability to output HTML code in a heredoc-style format, with any line of code beginning with a left angle bracket being interpreted as HTML with support for interpolated M locals and globals
188: .IP \(bu 2
189: Extensions allowing FreeM to be used as a command-line shell, along the lines of UNIX \fIbash\fR, Windows \fIcmd.exe\fR, etc.
190: .PP
1.5 ! snw 191: Trocha also maintains ownership of the \fIfreem.net\fR Internet domain,
1.3 snw 192: .[
193: trochaDomain
194: .]
1.5 ! snw 195: and continued issuing public releases of his FreeM port on that site until sometime after 2004, at which point this fork was made entirely private. Currently, freem.net is a blank page. However, trocha's fork of FreeM continues to the present as the back-end storage engine and programming environment for the www.elvenrunes.de website.
1.3 snw 196: .[
197: elvenRunes
198: .]
1.5 ! snw 199: The author has communicated with Mr. Trocha on occasion, and though he is supportive of the author's efforts, has chosen to remain in the background.
1.1 snw 200: .SH
201: Resuming Primary Development Branch
202: .PP
203: In 2011, the author downloaded the FreeM source code from the GUM Project's SourceForge repository\(emdormant since 2000\(emand updated it just enough that it would compile and run on modern GNU/Linux systems. The author also quickly updated FreeM to support terminal sizes larger than 80x24.
204: .SH
205: Taking Maintainership
206: .PP
1.5 ! snw 207: In 2014, Lawrence Landis transferred administrative access of the GUMP repository, conferring maintainership of the primary branch of FreeM development to the author. Since then, many features have been added and many bugs corrected, including:
1.3 snw 208: .IP \(bu 2
209: Adding support for proper namespaces, configured through a \fIfreem.conf\fR file, which standardizes routine and global storage locations
210: .IP \(bu 2
211: Adding support for Structured System Variables
212: .IP \(bu 2
213: Adding support for the asynchronous event specification from MDC Type A proposal \fIX11/1998-28\fR
214: .[
215: x119828
216: .]
217: .IP \(bu 2
218: Adding support for constants via the \fICONST\fR keyword
219: .IP \(bu 2
220: Adding a \fIWITH\fR command allowing the specification of an implicit prefix to all subsequent variable references
221: .IP \(bu 2
222: Adding a runtime \fIWATCH\fR command, tracking changes to specified local or global variables
223: .IP \(bu 2
224: Adding an \fIASSERT\fR command, which will fail with an error message if the following expression evaluates \fIfalse\fR
225: .IP \(bu 2
226: Removing the Steve Zeck symbol table implementation\(emwhich was unreliable\(emand reverting to the original implementation
227: .IP \(bu 2
228: Adding support for the GNU \fIreadline\fR library, with persistent command line history and editing
229: .IP \(bu 2
230: Adding REPL-like functionality (in direct mode, any M expression beginning with a number will be prepended with an implicit \fIWRITE\fR)
231: .IP \(bu 2
232: Adding transaction processing
233: .IP \(bu 2
234: Adding \fIKVALUE\fR and \fIKSUBSCRIPTS\fR
235: .IP \(bu 2
236: Preparing to support the \fIM Windowing API\fR (MWAPI)
237: .IP \(bu 2
238: Adding the \fIfmadm\fR command-line utility, for system administration functions
239: .IP \(bu 2
240: Adding support for after-image journaling and forward recovery of globals
1.5 ! snw 241: .KS
1.3 snw 242: .IP \(bu 2
243: Writing a \fItexinfo\fR manual, from which the HTML manual is derived
244: .IP \(bu 2
245: Porting to Solaris/SPARC, Solaris/x86, Linux/s390x, Linux/armv6l, Linux/armv7l, SCO OpenServer 5.0.7, Tru64 UNIX/alpha, AIX/ppc, Mac OS X/x86, GNU HURD, Cygwin, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and WSL1/2
246: .PP
1.5 ! snw 247: In addition, the FreeM web site
1.3 snw 248: .[
249: freemWebsite
250: .]
251: was created, to distribute downloads and documentation.
1.5 ! snw 252: .KE
1.3 snw 253: .SH
254: Future
255: .PP
1.5 ! snw 256: FreeM is envisioned as a client-oriented desktop M implementation, for developing graphical user interfaces that will run on mobile and desktop devices.
1.3 snw 257: .PP
258: The author also intends to adopt the original vision of the GUMP team, dividing FreeM's functionality into discrete components having a well-specified public interface, with the ability to run in distributed computing environments over a network.
259: .PP
260: FreeM's mission is to advance the state-of-the-art in M implementations, and push the evolution of the language forward. Maintaining portability to as many vintage and modern UNIX systems as possible is held as a high priority, while portability of M routines and MDC standards compliance will be maintained through the use of the new \fI$ZDIALECT\fR intrinsic special variable to ensure that such compliance does not conflict with the primary goal of elegantly advancing the state-of-the-art and finding new audiences for the concepts originated by Neil Pappalardo and Octo Barnett in 1966.
261: .PP
262: The FreeM project is also strongly committed to free software principles, and is firmly aligned with the goals of the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation, believing that the ethical concerns surrounding proprietary software are at least as important as the practical concerns espoused by the Open Source movement.
263: .[
264: whyFreeSoftware
265: .]
1.5 ! snw 266: .KS
! 267: .SH
! 268: Conclusion
! 269: .PP
! 270:
! 271: .KE
! 272: .SH
! 273: Copyright and License
! 274: .LP
! 275: This document is Copyright 2025 Serena Willis
! 276: .LP
! 277: Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License,
! 278: .[
! 279: gfdl
! 280: .]
! 281: Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts.
! 282: .LP
! 283: \fI$Id$\fR
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