FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Belinda Young/Debbie Lacy
Miller Communications
(213) 822-4669


NANTUCKET SHIPS CLIPPER 5.0 WITH VIRTUAL MEMORY MANAGEMENT

LOS ANGELES, September 11, 1990  Nantucket Corporation today
began shipping Clipper 5.0, its application development system
for PCs.  The company also announced that Clipper 5.0 now
includes a Virtual Memory Management System (VMM), effectively
removing any practical limits to the size of DOS applications.

Fulfillment of upgrade orders received to date will proceed in
the order they were received and be completed within the next two
weeks.  Shipments to distributors and resellers will immediately
follow.  The company is gearing up for its second production run,
with current orders already exceeding the first run of 40,000
units. 

In making the announcement today, Nantucket president and COO
Larry Heimendinger said,  "Clipper 5.0 represents a dramatic
advance in application development systems.  As of today,
developers can use their PCs to write the kind of large and
complex applications that were previously confined to mainframes
and minis."

Nantucket's virtual memory management system automatically stores
memory variables and database buffers in a dynamically sized
memory space comprised of main memory, expanded memory (LIM 3.2
or higher) and hard disk swap space.  The new memory manager
consists of two software subsystems performing different, but
related, tasks.  The "segmented" virtual memory subsystem can
address up to 64 megabytes of memory space, in 1 to 64 kilobyte
segments, with the actual maximum amount set by the developer.
For database buffering, Clipper 5.0's database driver uses
virtual memory up to the available capacity of RAM plus expanded
memory, usually 8 to 9 megabytes.

Complementing the segmented memory is a separate object memory
that manages, in the segmented memory, character and array values
generated by Clipper 5.0 applications.  The object memory
subsystem also has garbage collection capabilities, automatically
reclaiming memory occupied by values no longer needed. Object
memory can address up to 16 megabytes of the segmented virtual
memory space.  Clipper 5.0 is the first PC application
development system to implement virtual memory management on this
scale.

Together with Clipper's dynamic overlay linking, which permits
developers to build and run applications larger than available
main memory, VMM allows developers to write programs with no
practical memory limitations and improves the speed of most
operations.

"With Clipper 5.0, the bottom line is that developers can
concentrate on writing the best possible application, without
worrying about how big or complex it is," said Heimendinger.

In addition, Clipper 5.0 contains the first practical
implementation of technology yielded by Nantucket's Future
Technology research (NFT).  One of the foremost tenets of NFT is
a stated intention to deliver useful object-oriented programming
technologies to PC application developers, for improved
productivity.  That evolution begins in Clipper 5.0 with
pre-defined objects, which have been added to permit high levels
of customization and control in the key areas of error-handling,
browsing and data entry.  Pre-defined objects in Clipper 5.0
include TBrowse, TBColumn, Get and Error.

For example, in previous versions of Clipper simple browsing was
limited to databases, with browses of other kinds of information
made progressively more difficult and inflexible.  With Clipper
5.0's customizable TBrowse object, programmers can browse any
form of data, from databases to arrays and text strings, with
relative ease and total control. Similarly, the Get object allows
developers to customize the existing data entry system or easily
create a completely new counterpart. 

Clipper 5.0 is designed so that developers can continue to use
Summer '87 coding styles and syntax while adopting the new
programming strategies at their own pace.  In addition, the
company says that current dBASE and FoxPro developers can move
their applications to Clipper 5.0 with the same ease they
experienced moving their applications to Clipper Summer '87.

Programmer control and application architecture are also
significantly improved in Clipper 5.0 by:
         
    -a new error-handling system that automatically creates an
     error object when an error occurs and allows developers to
     build context-specific error-handling
    
    -multi-dimensional arrays that can contain arrays and can be
     dynamically sized,
    
    -LOCAL and STATIC variables for lexical scoping (so
     developers can use structured programming),
    
    -code blocks (that allow code to be passed as data)
    
    -a new source code debugger
    
    -user-defined commands
    
    -a preprocessor.
    
    -on-line documentation driven by the Norton Instant Access
     Engine.
    
Clipper 5.0 has a suggested list price of US $795.  The product
will be available through Nantucket's international network of
authorized resellers.  Registered users of previous versions can
upgrade for US $195, plus shipping and handling.  Clipper 5.0
will also be available in six foreign languages: French, German,
Spanish, Portuguese, Polish and Russian.  Initial shipments will
be exclusively English, with the German translation expected to
ship within a few days.  French and Portuguese translations will
become available by late October, with Spanish, Polish and
Cyrillic versions to follow during the last quarter of the
calendar year.

Founded in 1984, Los Angeles-headquartered Nantucket Corporation
is the leading developer of application development systems for
microcomputers.  Nantucket products are distributed
internationally through an office in the Soviet Union,
subsidiaries in the U.K., West Germany, Japan and Canada, and a
network of full-service distributors throughout the world.
