Nantucket - Clipper

Between 1985 and 1992 millions of Clipper applications were built, typically for small businesses managing clients and inventory; for many of them a Clipper application written to their needs was their first experience of software development, and banks and insurers used it for the systems too small for the mainframe and as a front end to the mainframe systems they had. The releases were named for seasons - Summer '85, Winter '85, Autumn '86, Summer '87 on 21 December 1987 - until Clipper 5.0 in 1990 and 5.01 in April 1991, by which point the language had absorbed elements of C and Pascal, object-oriented programming and the code block, a hybrid of dBASE macros and function pointers that made it far more powerful than the original.

In 1992 the company was sold to Computer Associates for 190 million dollars and the product became CA-Clipper: 5.20 in February 1993, 5.30 in June 1995, 5.3b on 20 May 1997, the final release. Under its new owner Clipper failed to make the transition from DOS to Windows, and almost no new commercial applications were written in it after 1995; Nantucket's Aspen project matured into CA-Visual Objects for Windows, and the developers moved to Visual Basic, Microsoft Access, Delphi and PowerBuilder, all strongly typed where the dBASE tradition was not. In November 1991 the New York Times had reported Nantucket's success in convincing Soviet developers that buying beat pirating: 2,000 copies sold there against 250,000 worldwide.

The language outlived the company twice over. Alaska Software's Xbase++ and FlagShip implement it commercially, and Harbour and xHarbour under the GPL, portable to Windows, Linux, Unix and macOS. Nantucket, with Ashton-Tate and Fox Software, was one of the three xBase firms bought within a year as the category peaked; the dBASE and Clipper glossary entries carry the language, and the Borland and Ashton-Tate records the rest of the family.