clipper

clipper, type of sailing ship, designed for speed. Long and narrow, the clipper had the greatest beam aft of the center; the bow cleaved the waves; and the ship carried, besides topgallant and royal sails, skysails and moonrakers—a veritable cloud of sails. The type originated in the United States. Baltimore clippers and Atlantic packet ships were the forerunners of the true Yankee clipper, which may be said to have emerged with the Ann McKim, completed in Baltimore in 1833. The Yankee clipper was brought to perfection by Donald McKay of Boston, who built such vessels as the Flying Cloud, the Glory of the Seas, and the Lightning. U.S. and British clippers came to be known as China clippers because they utilized their speed to carry on a flourishing China trade in tea and opium. Clippers sailed from the U.S. Atlantic coast around Cape Horn to California in the days of the gold rush. They steadily reduced the time for their long voyages and held famous races. The clipper came into being only after its finally successful rival, the steamship, was engaging in transoceanic voyages. In the early days the clipper easily outran the plodding steam vessel, but, ironically, the improved steamship began to forge ahead even as some of the fastest and most beautiful clippers were being built. When the Cutty Sark, one of the swiftest and most celebrated British clippers, was completed at Dunbarton, Scotland, in 1869, the era of the commercial sailing ship had nearly come to an end.

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(1) See CA-Clipper and CLIPPER chip.

(2) A family of 32-bit RISC microprocessors from Intergraph that were used in earlier graphics workstations.

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1.	(hardware, cryptography)	Clipper - An integrated circuit which implements the SkipJack algorithm. The Clipper is manufactured by the US government to encrypt telephone data. It has the added feature that it can be decrypted by the US government, which has tried to make the chip compulsory in the United States. Phil Zimmerman (inventor of PGP) remarked, "This doesn't even pass the sniff test" (i.e. it stinks). http://wired.com/clipper/. news:alt.privacy.clipper
2.		Clipper - A compiled dBASE dialect from Nantucket Corp, LA. Versions: Winter 85, Spring 86, Autumn 86, Summer 87, 4.5 (Japanese Kanji), 5.0. It uses the Xbase programming language.