Such an agreement was announced on the 6th of May 1992. Computer Associates acquired Nantucket, the original publisher of Clipper. The Clipper product is now known formally as "CA-Clipper."
The phone number (in the United States) for CA-Clipper technical support is +1 516 342 4612. (If you do not reach a qualified technician right away my experience is that you will receive a phone call back within about two hours.) You must already have a site number assigned by Computer Associates to use telephone support. Fortunately, one is provided when you send in your CA-Clipper registration card. If you never received your site ID, or forgot it, support will usually look it up for you if you ask nicely.
Computer Associates has a staff member assigned to monitor the CLIPPER forum on Compuserve and answer questions for users. Computer Associates staff members also read comp.lang.clipper with some regularity, although their presence is not a formal CA support function.
Your local PC user group is likely to have a database programming section or CA-Clipper special-interest group. You can find a list of recognized CA-Clipper user groups at ftp://ftp.cai.com/CAproducts/clipper/clipvoug.txt and a more current but less complete one at http://www.causergroups.com. (The latter is also just horrible in accessibility terms. You really cannot make much sense of it without a graphical browser.)
The phone number (in the United States) for CA-Visual Objects technical support is +1 516 342 4620.
CA-Visual Objects 1.0 is supported on the Compuserve forum VOFORUM.
CA-Visual Objects 2.0 is supported on the Compuserve forum CAVO20.
Any reasonably large software mail-order house in North America should carry CA-Clipper 5.3a for a price in the range of 400-600 dollars U.S. There are discounts for educational institutions and for live or competitive upgrades. CA-Clipper usually costs more outside of the US and Canada.
CA-Visual Objects 1.0c-2 can be ordered from the same places.
CA-Visual Objects 2.0 Standard is available for just under 100 US dollars from most resellers. CA-Visual Objects 2.0 Professional will cost just under 200 US dollars.
Publishers and resellers who specialize in CA-Clipper and CA-Visual Objects include:
Generally, nowhere that you can count on. The best advice is to watch forums, bulletin boards, and the newsgroups for offers to transfer a license on a new or used copy. Neither CA nor its major resellers is selling Summer '87 anymore.
EMS Professional Software buys and sells old compilers of all kinds. You're looking at perhaps USD 179.00 plus shipping from Maryland, USA. They appear to have a few copies of Summer '87 and 5.2 in stock at most times. Right now (March 1998) you can even get Autumn '86!
For the record, CA does NOT allow free use of Clipper Summer '87 on the same CPU for which CA-Clipper is already licensed. You really do need to scrounge a copy of Summer '87 to be legit.