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Comment by fcoury | Hacker News Reader

The first language I used professionally was CA-Clipper Summer 87 vesion, which shared many of the dBase and FoxPro characteristics.

The company I worked for had this full ERP solution that had many modules, Finances being one if them.

I remember we had DBF and NTX files for indexes and you needed to run a reindexing procedure every morning before all the employees would start using the system.

Once we got a support call claiming one of the users of such module was freaking out because the system was falsely accusing her.

Upon asking for more details we found that the system would stop with the very particular message of “corruption detected” :)

The ultimate fix was to ask everybody to logout and run the reindexing procedure, as always. But this funny story always stuck with me.

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Lol. Microsoft came up with the silliest error messages. Seeing an interruption box "illegal operation detected" after running traceroute as a kid... was a jarring experience.

I think I "yahoo'd" something about how much trouble I was in.

That’s pretty funny as well!

Made me remember when my friend’s father got this spanking new PC XT and I was super excited to play with it, since I only had an MSX computer back home.

I started playing with all sorts of different commands and I remember I found this one called TREE.COM. I ran it and minutes after the computer took a crap.

I was desperate with his father confronting me asking if I had done something bad and after a lot of pressure I confessed I ran TREE.COM and he thought that is what killed the computer.

It was eventually reformatted and got back to operating fine but it took me YEARS to figure out the dreaded TREE.COM command had nothing to do with it :-)

Anyways thanks for sharing!

The best one "This application has violated system integrity and must be terminated."

I started out with dBase II moved to 3 and graduated to Clipper. I adored Clipper and built my first company with it. Then with the introduction of Windows 3 the world changed and suddenly any DOS UI was ancient. I moved to Delphi and then the world changed again. The web caught my eye and I moved on again to ColdFusion.

Here in Michigan there are small niches where people are still selling Clipper programs and making a living from it, mostly one or two person teams.

That is amazing to hear, I would love to get back to those years through some existing software. The thing I most remember about Clipper 5 is that it had CodeBlocks that resemble today’s closures in most languages. Do you remember that? :)

My pathway right after was Delphi as well.

After it “ended” I contributed a tiny bit to the Harbour project but I think it came a little too late.

Yes, IIRC, Clipper 5's big marketing point was `aeval`! (short for array eval, array.map in modern langs).

Clipper also had a huge array of third party libraries, I fondly remember Nanfor, Grumpfish, and SuperLib.

If you want to see some code, here's a repo of one of my Clipper projects: https://github.com/jasim/EasyAccounts

There is also The Oasis mirrors which have a large cache of Clipper code: https://harbour.github.io/the-oasis/docs/

Whoa I will definitely check it out tomorrow. Thanks for sharing!

Classes and functional programming in MS-DOS.

Sometimes I dive into old programming stuff I used to do, mostly forgotten and then get amazed how I was doing OOP, functional programming, memory safe systems programming, some form of automatic memory management, AOT compiled languages (statically linked) and now it seems everyone is kind of rediscovering what we were doing almost 40 years ago.

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