Tag Archives: personal computers

Clipper In Short

Posted on by vivaclipper

Clipper is a programming language, and it is also a compiler. The programming language is a superset of dBASE III+, and also shares some features with C/C++ and Smalltalk. It is a general-purpose, high-level programming language well suited to corporate and commercial applications development.

Clipper is also a compiler product. The Clipper compiler is (by definition) a fully conformant implementation of the Clipper programming language for IBM-PC-type personal computers running DOS-like operating systems.

There are other Clipper implementations,  that have varying capabilities and run on platforms other than MS-DOS.

Q: Isn’t Clipper obsolete?

A: Clipper, the commercial compiler for DOS ?  Well, it’s definitely stopped evolving; the owner company has announced that 5.3 will be the last significant release and only maintenance patches will be forthcoming.

There is a lot of maintenance work for good Clipper programmers. And when you do write that occasional new DOS program (some of us still do!), Clipper is an outstanding choice. But for most programmers in business today, yeah, there are really not too many applications that you would write from scratch with Clipper.

Clipper, the language? Definitely not obsolete. Clipper clones, improvements, and adaptations; commercial or not, are everywhere.

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Note : Gathered from 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.

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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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