MAPPER

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This article is about 4GL software. For other meanings, see Mapper (disambiguation).

MAPPER (Maintaining and Preparing Executive Reports) is a 4GL that was developed by the Sperry Corporation for use on its systems; MAPPER's heritage dates back to the 1960s when Louis Schlueter conceived of the CRT RPS (Report Processing System - to differentiate it from RPG) as a means to help Sperry/Univac to manage disparate activities involved with coordinating hardware and software development, with identifying and meeting requirements for new systems, and with maintaining existing systems. ^[1] ^[2].

CRT RPS became MAPPER in 1975. That proving ground plus the development of the UNIVAC 1100 allowed release for more general use in 1979. ^[3] MAPPER was intended for End-user computing from the beginning and was the first to use more advanced techniques. MAPPER applied a powerful cabinet and drawer metaphor to handle directories and file. Data was represented in a 'row and column' framework which pre-dated spreadsheet methods. High-level commands allowed easy programming.

A major use of MAPPER was by the Santa Fe railroad to track its freight cars which involved large-scale data handling and real-time transactions. ^[4] The development was done by railroad management experts and not by programmers obtaining a productivity improvement of 8-to-1. In addition, the approach was ahead of its time in use of rapid prototyping and a 4GL.

In 1986, the Sperry European Center for Artificial Intelligence, headed by Carlos Fdez. Esteban, began a project (headed by Martyn Richard Jones) to build an Expert Systems application development environment in MAPPER (codenamed MAPPER/ESD), the working prototype was completed by May 1987, and was the first truly tightly integrated piece of database and artificial intelligence technology anywhere in the world, a technology breakthrough that contained a sophisticated rules editor and inference engine at the conceptual level of the data dictionary, this development would later be embedded in Unisys Airline and Government applications.

There have been versions of MAPPER for various platforms, including the Univac 1100, Sperry 2200, a version for Unix called MAPPER/C (it was a version of MAPPER rewritten in C), and Personal MAPPER.

In the mid 1980s Sperry actively marketed MAPPER, including advertising featuring "MAPPER Man", the self-empowered executive end-user computing person. Sperry in the Scandanavian countries even had a MAPPER song written and performed by an ABBA style group.

A 1989 survey by Unisys showed that 140 of 224 UNIVAC 1100 customers were using MAPPER.

MAPPER is still in use having been upgraded to be part of the Unisys BIS ^[5]. Today in 2007, MAPPER in the guise of Unisys BIS can run websites with its own .asp front end, has an integrated JavaScript engine, can produce XML for B2B and is able to manipulate SOAP objects. It is a RAD development tool, producing applications very quickly. MAPPER comes with its own very powerful database, but can be linked to a variety of others including Oracle and SQLserver. You can do things in MAPPER with two statements, which would take other languages pages of code to do. In the industry, it is known as Unisys’s best kept secret.