MAPPER
Encyclopedia
- This article is about 4GL software. For other meanings, see Mapper (disambiguation)MapperMapper has several meanings:* Device mapper, handler for Linux.* Level designer, a person who designs levels for video games.* MAPPER, a Fourth-generation programming language originally sold by Sperry Corporation ....
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MAPPER (MAintain, Prepare, and Produce Executive Reports) is a database management and reporting system that includes the world's first 4GL
Fourth-generation programming language
A fourth-generation programming language is a programming language or programming environment designed with a specific purpose in mind, such as the development of commercial business software. In the history of computer science, the 4GL followed the 3GL in an upward trend toward higher...
. Developed in-house by the UNIVAC Division of Sperry Corporation
Sperry Corporation
Sperry Corporation was a major American equipment and electronics company whose existence spanned more than seven decades of the twentieth century...
, MAPPER's heritage dates back to the 1960s when Louis Schlueter conceived the CRT RPS (Report Processing System, to differentiate it from RPG) as a means to help Sperry/Univac manage disparate activities involved with coordinating hardware and software development, with identifying and meeting requirements for new systems, and with maintaining existing systems. .
CRT RPS became MAPPER in 1975. That proving ground, plus the development of the UNIVAC
UNIVAC
UNIVAC is the name of a business unit and division of the Remington Rand company formed by the 1950 purchase of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, founded four years earlier by ENIAC inventors J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, and the associated line of computers which continues to this day...
1100, and pressure from customers, most notably Sante Fe railroad, led to a release for more general use in 1979. MAPPER was intended for End-user computing
End-user computing
In computing, End User Computing refer to systems in which non-programmers can create working applications. EUC is a group of approaches to computing that aim at better integrating end users into the computing environment...
from the beginning, and was the first to use more advanced techniques. MAPPER applied a powerful cabinet and drawer metaphor to handle directories and files. Data was represented in a 'row and column' framework which pre-dated spreadsheet methods. High-level commands allowed easy programming.
An early major use of MAPPER was by the Santa Fe
Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway
The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway , often abbreviated as Santa Fe, was one of the larger railroads in the United States. The company was first chartered in February 1859...
railroad to track its freight cars, which involved large-scale data handling and real-time transactions. The development was done by railroad management experts, not programmers, and realized a productivity improvement of 8-to-1. In addition, the approach was ahead of its time in using rapid prototyping and a 4GL (4th-Generation Language).
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 (code-named MAPPER/ESD). The working prototype was completed by May 1987, and was the first implementation of tight integration between relational database and artificial intelligence technology. A technological 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.
In the mid 1980s Sperry actively marketed MAPPER, including advertising featuring "MAPPER Man", the self-empowered executive end-user. In the Scandinavian countries, Sperry even had a MAPPER song - "Do it the MAPPER way!" (1983) - written and performed by an ABBA style group.
MAPPER is supported on a number of platforms, including the Univac 1100 and Sperry 2200 mainframes, Unisys A-Series mainframes, Unix, Windows NT, Windows PCs, and most recently a version for LINUX.
A 1989 survey by Unisys
Unisys
Unisys Corporation , headquartered in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, United States, and incorporated in Delaware, is a long established business whose core products now involves computing and networking.-History:...
showed that 140 of 224 UNIVAC
UNIVAC
UNIVAC is the name of a business unit and division of the Remington Rand company formed by the 1950 purchase of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, founded four years earlier by ENIAC inventors J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, and the associated line of computers which continues to this day...
1100 customers were using MAPPER. By 2006 there were more than 600 sites using MAPPER for Windows NT.
Today, MAPPER is in use by thousands of sites worldwide. It has seen a number of modernization upgrades, and was renamed Unisys
Unisys
Unisys Corporation , headquartered in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, United States, and incorporated in Delaware, is a long established business whose core products now involves computing and networking.-History:...
Business Information Server (BIS), although diehard MAPPER lovers still refer to it as MAPPER. MAPPER can run websites with its own .asp
Active Server Pages
Active Server Pages , also known as Classic ASP or ASP Classic, was Microsoft's first server-side script engine for dynamically-generated Web pages. Initially released as an add-on to Internet Information Services via the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack Active Server Pages (ASP), also known as Classic...
front end, has an integrated JavaScript
JavaScript
JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....
engine, can produce XML
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
for B2B, and is able to manipulate SOAP
SOAP
SOAP, originally defined as Simple Object Access Protocol, is a protocol specification for exchanging structured information in the implementation of Web Services in computer networks...
objects. It is a RAD
RAD
Rad may mean:* Rad , a villainous character in AC Comics's "Femforce"* Rad , a 1986 release about a young BMX rider* Rad , several fictional characters in the Transformers toy line...
development tool, producing robust applications very quickly. MAPPER comes with its own very powerful database, and can be linked to a variety of others, including Oracle
Oracle database
The Oracle Database is an object-relational database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation....
and SQL
SQL
SQL is a programming language designed for managing data in relational database management systems ....
server.
You can do things in MAPPER with two statements that would take pages of code in other languages. In the industry, it is known as Unisys
Unisys
Unisys Corporation , headquartered in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, United States, and incorporated in Delaware, is a long established business whose core products now involves computing and networking.-History:...
’ best kept secret.
External links
- Professor Bird's article on MAPPER - http://drmichaelbird.com/mapper_unisys.html - This is an article on the internet published by Professor M. Bird at DeVry University of South Florida where he discusses that the MAPPER database management system, regardless of the name, has been a successful database and will continue to thrive over the years by remaining ahead of its time. As presented in this article, the MAPPER database management system has been strong in the Unisys client community and remains successful, even with its rename to BIS, by evolving to meet the changing conditions and needs of the business community.