Reviving a 30-Year-Old Clipper DOS Accounting System Still in Use
Hello friends,
Today — with a bit of AI assistance — I lifted a 30-year-old DOS/Clipper FIBU accounting system (still running in DOSBox at a customer site!) into a clean modern web UI — without any frameworks, without Bootstrap.
The entire frontend is already in place:
Journal viewer
Booking screen
Account inquiry page
Balance list
Custom CSS/JS
Full API structure
Lightweight PHP proxy layer
PHP acts only as a thin JSON proxy, while the complete accounting logic continues to run unchanged inside our existing Microservice.
The Microservice handles:
all DBF operations (shared/exclusive, locking, record read/write)
full JSON processing (in/out)
HTTP and WebSocket routing
Harbour code embedded directly in C
robust error handling and unified logging
extremely low latency via local communication (127.0.0.1:9090)
1:1 reuse of all original business logic — no rewrite required
Because the Microservice already provides everything (DBF access, routing, JSON I/O, logging), the remaining Harbour work has become almost trivial — we only need to wrap the original PRG routines into clean handlers.
The full technical foundation is now in place — and all of this came together in under one hour.
Best regards,
Otto
