Clipper’s fans ahoy

Press, 25 July 1989, Page 31

Clipper’s fans ahoy

If dBASE is a sturdy all-purpose freighter of the microcomputer database world, Clipper, from the software firm, Nantucket, is what its name signifies. It began as a compiler for dBASE, turning systems written in dBASE into swift-running, standalone programs. It has improved steadily in a series of editions, but remains chiefly a tool for the programmer, rather than the home user of dBASE. Clipper has grown into a system complete in itself.

The person who uses it tends to be someone like Chris Persson, a Christchurch systems analyst and designer, who works through his one-man firm, Adotro Software. Chris has written an enrolment system and numerous job-costing systems for professional people and manufacturers.

An old hand at dBASE, he began using version II under CP/M, which was killed off by the IBM PC operating system, MS-DOS. Since then he has tutored in dBASE as well as made a good living from it. Chris made ripples at a meeting called by the Christchurch branch of the Computer Society last year when the future of data-processing in Canterbury was being decided. It was not long after the Government Health Computing Service had been bought by Paxus, and the air was full of gloom about jobs for those displaced. Chris joined some micro people in saying there was a demand for those who could develop dBASE systems and then rushed out, declaring he had so much work he could not stay any longer. Only two or three other Christchurch users of Clipper are known to busy Chris, but he would like to hear from any serious users (at telephone 481-946), with a view to forming a group. The people he has in mind are people writing systems on commission — not home users and hobbyists. OKI Roadshow

The latest goods from the Japanese firm, OKI, from a laptop computer with a built-in cellular telephone to video telephones, will be on show at Noahs Hotel, Christchurch, on Friday. The video telephones allow simultaneous transmission of voice and data, and provide a colour moving picture at 10 frames a second. The OKI printer range, laser and dot-matrix, will be on show, as will a plain-paper facsimile machine. Mac Excel 2.20 Excel 2.2 for the Macintosh has been shipped in New Zealand by Brimaur Microsoft. It can use up to BMb of Mac memory, compared with the IMb of earlier versions. It is reported to be up to 40 per cent faster than Excel 1.5, the most common spreadsheet program used in Macs. Presentation is enhanced: up to 256 fonts can be used in a single spreadsheet, and row heights adjust to accommodate large font sizes. Cells can be shaded. Additional chart types are provided. Almost 200 macro functions have been added. The minimum requirement is a Mac Plus wotj IMb of memory and operating system 6.02. The suggested retail price is $lO5O before GST, and $250 for upgrades. Brother DR DOS Brother Industries is to use the DR DOS operating system from Digital Research in a business machine to be released soon. DR DOS is a single-user, single-task operating system fully compatible with MSDOS. Source swallowed up The Source, the American on-line database for microcomputer users, has been taken over by its larger rival, CompuServe, and will be absorbed from August 1. The Source was a pioneer of information for microcomputers but is now only about the fifth the size of CompuServe. Sun and Lotus Sun Microsystems and Lotus Development Corporation have signed an agreement to help each other in the Unix desktop computer market. Lotus will develop applications to run on Sun’s three computing platforms: the SPARC Open Look-based work stations; the 68000-based Sun 3 line; and the 80386 based Sun3B6i. This is Lotus’s first foray into Unix.