Alex Gay (10/7/2015)

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I used to work for a hospital that had a clinical letters system written in Clipper, for an XBase file based database, that was 15-20 years old when replaced with a modern web based solution. There was a lot of resistance from the secretaries who liked the keyboard shortcuts of the old system, and feared that a new interface would slow down their work rate.

The problem was after that many years we only had three members of staff who could program Clipper well enough to provide support, and they were the IT Director, Head of IT and Head of Information. Which would mean that upgrades or bug fixes would cost too much, and be nearly impossible to schedule. I'm not even sure that the compiler would install on a modern OS.

There comes a time when, no matter how popular a piece of software, that you have to replace it.