Category Archives: History

Some historical notes on past of Clipper

Early days of Clipper

Posted on by vivaclipper

Notes on early days of Clipper

Some quotations :

Clipper was originally built in 1985 as a compiler for dBASE III.

Clipper was built by Nantucket Corporation led by Barry ReBell (management) and Brian Russell (technical), and  later sold to …

Source

         ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Brett Oliver, Jim Warner, Brian Russell, Richard McConnell …

Main architects and primary developers of Clipper and founders of Nantucket Corporation. It was 1984 when
Clipper was born.

Source

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Clipper Summer’87 Manual, “Credits” page :

ClpSum87Credits

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Clipper 5.0 Manual, “Credits” page :

Clp5.0Credits

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… and 30 years after birth of this phenomenal myth, one (or first) of main builders suddenly appeared : Brett Oliver !

By a comment to one page of this blog :

Not only main starter / builder of Clipper, he is also author of wonderful books :

Clipper Programming: An In-Depth Introduction to Programming

This book also is a myth.

And he told me on request, something on beginning and building story of this great myth;

Brian was working at Ashton-Tate, as was I.

I was in tech support, alongside Brian, and customers that were phoning in kept asking for a compiler.

So I approached Barry for the money to back it. He had a temp agency. I met him in the Ashton-Tate cafeteria.

I recruited Brian at lunch at a Japanese restaurant in Culver city.

Clipper was the first program Brian had written in ‘C’.

He learned C as he programmed Clipper.

I asked him when I was recruiting him if he had ever written a compiler.

He said he had written a Pascal compiler in university. (He later admitted that it had never worked!).

The first development office was a beach house in Malibu.

Tom Rettig was the editor for dNEWS at Ashton-Tate. I took over as editor of dNEWS.

I was the first VP of sales, and one of my employees was Mary Beth. I introduced her to Brian and later they married.

At the first Comdex in Vegas, Brian was upstairs in his room – coding.

He got one command to work – paint a dot on the screen. We demonstrated that one command, and showed that we could draw a box 20 times faster than dBASE.

I wrote a couple of books on Clipper, and was also on the dBASE for Windows development team at Borland. 

I worked with Tom at his condo in Santa Monica for a time. Too bad he died.

Barry died in 2009.

Brian and I went dirt biking together. He loaned me his street bike for a couple of months when my car was getting fixed. He is a good guy. I think he is working in LA.

We live in San Diego, – my wife is from Liechtenstein. We have three boys.

I am Scottish. Currently programming in eCommerce.

Anyway, nice chatting.

Stay in touch.

I wish he will write more …

dBASE and Wayne Ratliff

Posted on by vivaclipper

dBASE may be traced back to the mid 1960’s in the form of a system called RETRIEVE, which was marketed by Tymshare Corporation. RETRIEVE was used by Jet Propulsion Laboratory of Pasadena,Calif. In the late 60’s Jeb Long, a new programmer at JPL, was assigned the task of writing a program which would perform the same functions as RETRIEVE.

Back in 1973 he was a software engineer at the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he developed a file management program called JPLDIS (Jet Propulsion Laboratory Display Information System) written in FORTRAN, running in a UNIVAC 1108 mainframe. He spent over 11 years at JPL, being responsible for many of the software development tasks of USA’s space program, like the Mariner and Viking missions to Mars.

JPLDIS was the precursor of dBASE, that runs in CP/M microcomputers. Latter with Wayne Ratliff, Jeb Long translated that original version of dBASE II to run in an IBM PC. All that work was been done in assembly language.

Jeb was one of the founders of Ashton-Tate and was there for 8 years. He was known as the guru of the dBASE products at Ashton-Tate, and was the architect of the dBASE language and responsible for its components for all versions of dBASE III and dBASE IV, with the exception of the initial dBASE version.

Jeb Long is an experienced software designer and engineer. Since he left Ashton-Tate back in 1990 he has been working as an independent consultant and writer of numerous technical documents, books and articles for technical magazines, and had been working for some of the most prestigious companies at the USA

From 1969 to 1982, Wayne Ratliff worked for the Martin Marietta Corporation in a progression of engineering and managerial positions. He was a member of the NASA Viking Flight Team when the Viking spacecraft landed on Mars in 1976, and wrote the data-management system, MFILE, for the Viking lander support software.

In 1978, he wrote a database program in assembly language, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Passadena, California. He called it Vulcan (after Mr. Spock of Star Trek), that was based on Jeb Long’s JPLDIS. This program was written to help him win the football pool at the office, which he marketed by himself from 1979 to 1980. Vulcan had its ups and downs and by 1980 was in what seemed to be a permanent down state.

Ratliff was born in 1946 in Trenton, Ohio and raised in various cities and towns in Ohio and Germany. He later resides in the Los Angeles area.

In late 1980 he met George Tate, who found the product worth while and entered into a marketing agreement with Ashton-Tate and renamed the Vulcan product dBASE H. Wayne had given up trying to sell copies of it for $50 each. George told him that he thought it would sell better at $695, so they made a deal and dBASE II was the result. In mid-1983, Ashton-Tate purchased the dBASE II technology and copyright from Ratliff and he joined Ashton-Tate as vice president of new technology. Ratliff was the project manager for dBASE III, as well as designer and lead programmer.

The program was renamed dBASE II because they knew that version 1 wouldn’t sell. It originally ran on a CP/M computer and then was moved over to the IBM PC.

Note there was never anyone named Ashton, it sounded better. Ashton was a maccaw (parrot) that was the unofficial mascot of Ashton-Tate.

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This article gathered from here.

Five years: A Brief History.

Posted on by vivaclipper

In February 2002 I’ve published the first MiniGUI version.

At that moment, only an experiment whose target for me was research about Harbour-C interface.

A lot of people were interested in the Project and from the beginning collaborated with me in many ways.

Some months later I’ve noticed that the experiment could turn in something more serious.

Being one of my basic targets the easy of use (according xBase spirit) a little time later I’ve added the ‘semi-oop’ interface. That turned the combination of Harbour+MiniGUI in a tool that besides a xBase compiler, offered a GUI, as easy to use as the VB one (yet simpler). This made grow even more the MiniGUI popularity and with it, the problems.

Some people, began an aggressive campaign of lies, pointing not only technical aspects of Harbour and MiniGUI, but personal issues, targeted to create false conflicts in the discussion groups. I let to the readers criteria the theories about the motivations of that people.

This growing brings other problems too. The most serious were the discrepancies about technical issues related with the project direction. Some contributors were not coinciding with my vision of that.

I must accept that could had been solutions for these problems, joining efforts in favor an unique target, but sadly, I don’t knew how to find solution in time.

Today there are two alternative MiniGUI versions besides mine. Yet I’ve wished to find a solution for the differences to make this not happened, that means that the seeding done five years ago, had got results, even much more ahead of my own expectations.

MiniGUI had never existed without its users and contributors and is to them (as every year) my endless gratitude.

Specially to those that got to me the initial impulse, as Grigory Filatov, Jacek Kubica, Ciro Vargas Clemov, Ryszard Rylko (who allow to me to include the HbPrinter code in MiniGUI) and Janusz Pora (I’ve had serious discrepancies with him, but I recognize his enormous efforts and enthusiasm).

For the ‘classic’ OOP defenders that had attacked MiniGUI during years, I want to remember them, that VB turned in the most popular development tool in the world, based in a non-classic scheme for GUI handling, oriented to make things easier for the programmer, let him focus in the problem to solve instead to do it the language complexities. If we are in the xBase world is because this is that we want (or must want). MiniGUI must not be ‘corrected’ to be converted to a traditional paradigm. It is simply an alternative, and as such, we have right to grant its existence.

Regarding the future, It could not be better.

Harbour is in Beta 1, extremely solid and efficient. Surely we have the final version soon.

Regarding MiniGUI, is extremely stable and reliable too. Since I successfully adapted it to work with MingW, we have now with a completely free package (Harbour + MiniGUI + MingW).

Finally, I want to thank to all people that collaborated in some way and whose contributions are documented in five years of ‘changelogs’ and (of course) an special thanks to Pepe Ruano, creator and administrator of harbourminigui.com

There is a lot to do, but I can say with satisfaction that my old dream, a Clipper for Windows free and easy to use, has been reached.

Thanks To All.

Roberto Lopez

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Note: This article borrowed by courtesy of author.

           Published at :  March 03, 2007 here.

Milestones

Posted on by vivaclipper


Neither possible to know nor remember everybody who participated this great work.

These are only the biggest milestones, great men who succeed great jobs.

C. Wayne Ratliff

Designed and programmed the first successful DBMS for personal computers, dBASE II; originally named Vulcan. Renamed dBASE II and published in 1981.  It was not only a relational database management system (RDBMS), but also was an interpreted language and would quickly spawn the “xBbase” industry.

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Brett Oliver, Jim Warner, Brian Russell, Richard McConnell  …

Main architects and primary developers of Clipper and founders of Nantucket Corporation.  It was 1984 when Clipper was born. Look at here for a tale.

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Tom Rettig  ( 1941-1996 )

A major guru in the dBASE, Clipper, whole xBase community. 

Small in stature, but big in heart, a friend in the truest sense. 

More about Tom Rettig.

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Antonio Linares

Initiator and one of main developers of Harbour.

The starter of Harbour.

The great man who started the big engines!

He is here.

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Phil Barnett

The biggest Clipper fan! 

Author of most useful Clipper utilities,  Harbour Manager, keeper of pieces and parts for years.

He and his famous and largest Clipper repository is here (archive)

Addendum:

A “last” note about Phil.

R.I.P.

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(Le Roy) Roberto Lopez

Founder, builder and developer of HMG, Harbour MiniGUI. 

The great man who disclose blocked doors and roads!

He is here.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Viktor Szakáts,  Przemysław Czerpak, Pritpal Bedi, …

Today Habour development is leading by Viktor Szakáts with huge collaborations and leading many components of core and contribs by Przemysław Czerpak. Some components are developed by Pritpal Bedi. Others members participate the project by sending changes to the Sourceforge SVN repository.  As 2011 Harbour development is keeping vibrant activity

They are here.

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A tale about Clipper

Posted on by vivaclipper

ShipSilhouette5

A tale about the origin of Clipper

There is a tale about the origin of CA-Clipper. Whether it is true or not, few people know, but “insiders” have said that it is not far from the truth. Here it is.

One day in a seafood restaurant in Malibu, California, an Ashton-Tate employee and a consultant friend were having lunch. They were expressing their annoyance at the fact that Ashton-Tate had not created a compiler for the dBase language.

The two thought that maybe they should have a go at starting up a new company to create the compiler. As the excitement grew and the ideas flew, the issue of a product name came up.

One of the two noticed a picture of a sailing ship on the napkin (after all this was a seafood restaurant). It was a clipper ship — a sleek, speedy, and elegant thing. That seemed to describe what they were trying to create.

What about the company name? The menu answered that question — the restaurant name was Nantucket Lighthouse.

And so Nantucket’s Clipper was born.

The consultant was Barry ReBell and the Ashton-Tate employee was Brian Russell.

Since that time there were four “seasonally” named versions of the compiler: Winter 85, Spring 86, Autumn 86, Summer 87. Very “California”…

These early versions clearly billed themselves as dBase compilers, with the Summer 87 version displaying “dBase III® compiler” on the floppy disks and documentation.

Many programmers using Clipper at the time were really “just” dBase programmers with a tool to create faster programs. So it was quite a shock to them when Clipper 5 was released. “What have they done to our language?”, they asked. Local variables? Code blocks? Tbrowse?

But there were also those of us who had strained against the limitations of the dBase language — the lack of modularity, the clumsiness, the vulnerability of public and private variables.

So we recognized that Clipper 5 was a turning point in the history of the Xbase language. No longer billed as a dBase compiler, Clipper became an “Application Development System”. A real language.

Well, maybe not as real as C, but getting there. In fact, many Clipper 5 concepts were borrowed from C and other languages. The increment operator (++) and expression lists, for example, seem to have come from C, while code blocks may have been inspired by SmallTalk

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This article borrowed by courtesy of author,  from here.

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Please look at here for continuation of this post.

 

Tom Rettig

Posted on by vivaclipper 


Tom Rettig was a major guru in the dBASE, Clipper and whole xBase community.  Among Tom’s accomplishments multiple utilities that allowed development in xBase to be easier and faster.


Tom Rettig was one of the main reasons we can use the term “community” when we talk about the groups of xBase people. Tom was one of the designers of dBASE III and wrote the essential reference book on it. He built the first add-on library for Clipper, pioneering the public domain tools that make xBase jobs easier. Tom wrote articles for many xBase magazines and periodicals. Tom Rettig’s Help and Tom Rettig’s Handbooks taught us the some complexity and difficulty of xBase.


He participated in the IEEE xBASE “standardization” efforts. Tom is considered one of main gurus of xBase history. His program and documentations are legendary.


 


A “Program for Life” authored by the late Tom Rettig










* remember.prg
* Sometimes we forget...






USE Yourself exclusive

SET TALK OFF
CLEAR

DO WHILE ALIVE
   STORE "LOVE" TO heart
   STORE "health" TO body
   STORE "peace" TO mind
   STORE "compassion" TO others
   STORE "esteem" TO self
   STORE "faith" TO God

   REPLACE Negative   WITH Positive , ;
           Judgment   WITH Acceptance , ;
           Resentment WITH Forgiveness

   REPLACE Hopelessness    WITH Choice , ;
           Confusion       WITH Clarity , ;
           Procrastination WITH Participation

   REPLACE Separation WITH Connection , ;
           Lack       WITH Abundance , ;
           Sorrow     WITH Celebration

   @ all, times SAY your_truth

   If its_time
      EXIT
   ENDIF

ENDDO

SAVE TO Always
CLEAR ALL

RETURN

* EOF: remember.prg