The Unisys MAPPER Virtual Report Processing system is essentially an industry secret. This is remarkable considering that the system has been in development and worldwide implementation in a multi-billion $ hardware base for over 30 years.
The story of the survival and accomplishment of this system is a testimonial to the entrepreneurial spirit of the developers, and customer users. The system survives in spite of corporate resistance and neglect simply because it successfully provides a kind of programmerless information processing that users feel is the way that computers are supposed to be used.
Today it offers the most powerful set of information processing tools and database capability in the world, bar none. Properly implemented, it could be the next major Killer Application, greater in productivity potential than word processing and spread sheets combined. It offers enormous profit potential either through effective marketing or as the basis of an investment stock IPO.
The book, "Virtual Report Processing - The MAPPER Story", by Louis Schlueter chronicles the history of MAPPER systems, denoting the roles of some of the pioneers and the struggles to develop the MAPPER software system market often in the face of corporate opposition and neglect.
