[flatlander_48]

I'm a retired mechanical engineer. In the mid-80's I got involved in doing discrete event simulation work. There were computer languages that you could use to write programs that emulated a physical situation that was made up of events of particular sequences, particular durations, etc. We wrote programs that emulated production lines so that we could evaluate the performance of the production line, look for bottlenecks and evaluate solutions. We used GPSS/H from Wolverine Software. While we had all sorts of queuing and delay information in printed form, it was difficult to explain to our internal customers.

Meanwhile, a company called AutoSimulations developed software with the ability to do real time display of the simulation model results and it was hosted on an Iris workstation. We would bring people in to see how the performance changed as a result of changing model parameters. We also had the ability to record to video tapes...