@cstross @Infoseepage @Steveg58
It happens that I did some work on a similar system for the Tongan govt when I was living in Tonga, in the early 1980s.
MP/M was pretty nifty - the system I coded on, from a small Australian company, had shared disk storage, but a separate CPU board for each terminal/user, so users had no contention for RAM or CPU resources. That's quite the achievement for a system built on 8-bit CPUs!
Well into the '90s Tonga was still running the invoice app I wrote them.