I've worked on programs similar to this since the late 1960's. Something recognizable as this particular program was written in the early 1980's. In the mid 1990's a much more powerful variant was created that required a large number of 680x0 CPUs networked together via a commonVME buss backplain.
In early summer 2001 the project I was working on was canceled and I decided to revisit this program until my next project started. I converted the solution generator to GCC Linux and then started to redo all the graphic output routines in X. Then I realized that if I used java instead of X I could kill two birds with one stone because the same code would allow mill owners and operators to monitor the end-dogger from any point on their network using a browser. So I threw out all the X code and rewrote it in java. In addition to allowing monitoring from virtually anywhere in the world (if the machine is given a public IP address) this solution also solves one of the major requests from mill operators over the years. They often would like to have some type of output unique to their plant. The folks who supply these systems resist these requests because it makes each system unique and every line of special code is another place to create a bug. This approach using java in a browser allows a mill to customize their own java routines without requiring special code in the solution generator itself.
The long form answer will have to wait until I have more time.