Before diving headlong into that herculean effort, however, it will be necessary to get up close and personal with DECwindows. I've started re-reading Dave Bynon's VAXstation articles and updated my electronic telephone book with his latest home phone number. You can run, David, but you can't hide. ISV members have personal representatives assigned to them, actual, identifiable humans from whom to seek help. Frankly, windowing environments are rather rare in my primary applications development area, database publishing.
Most processing is done in batch mode, which requires little in the way of graphical interfacing.
But the primary users of my software have been migrating to workstations in order to ease the processing burden on their main cpus and to handle integrated graphics. If I don't provide a windowing interface, something that works seamlessly with the other applications, then I'm going left in the dust. At least on VAXstations, DCL is still around, lurking in the background. A VAXstation is still a VAX, still requires VMS system management skills, and still uses DCL to get things done, even though the user may be insulated from its presence to a degree. But the main thrust of this column will continue to be getting the most out of Digital Command Language, regardless of the platform.