While preparing my “Fletch Programming Skills Marketability Index” for the week I ran in to a posting for a Clipper Support Analyst.
Wow! Clipper is still around. That brings back memories, Clipper, FoxPro, Turbo Pascal, Quick C, DOS, 640k/704k RAM, Novell…(I’m dating myself)
Have you run into other bizarre or unexpected things out there? Would you mind sharing with us?
My Dentist’s receptionist has a PC with the familiar DBase type DOS front end burning itself into the phosphorus every time I go have my teeth checked.
My company still maintains programs written for DOS in Microsoft C. When Microsoft introduces new OS’s, virtual drivers get written to keep it going.
Some years ago I came across active BP7 forums (fora?), because large setups with single-application PCs still exist.
We programmers always get excited by the latest programming paradigmas, but there is a world out there that just wants to get work done and if the tool still works and everyone knows how it operates, the cost of upgrading is hard to justify.
To beat everyone else … my hometown Camping site still uses an app I developed in 1986 (!) using DBase III+ .
After many an adventure , they agreed to pay for an all singing and dancing Delphi app (which I hope to have finished by the end of the year).
I have a client which is still using software developed in the windows (16 bit) version of Clipper in Windows XP!
I also know of a few companies (4 in all) which have even today a very large customer base using their FoxPro 2.0 based software even today. The surprising this is that the sum total of customers of all of these companies goes above 1 million!
Its 2008, but xBase products are still thriving. For all you clipperheads as we used refer to ourselves, here is a company that is taking Clipper to the next level – native 32 bit GUI apps for Windows using Clipper language set. Its almost like Delphi for Clipper.
http://www.alaska-software.com/products/xpp/xpp.shtm
And I love this quote from the website:
“With Xbase++ 1.90, it is possible to use .NET components in Xbase++ applications”
Who would have thought Clipper supporting .NET :-O
And Clipper apps can also now support USB printers and add email support.
I am almost tempted to one day try and port my Video Store Retail application to Xbase for fun.