🚀 go-pugleaf

Apologies if this has been discussed in the past - I've just started
reading this news group.

Our company is using PC hardware in an ever increasing amount for production
and service test fixturing.  As could be expected, we are now confronting
serious problems in maintanence, resources and productivity, as well as 
a number of confusing interfaces.  We are looking to standardize on an
interface strategy, as well as productivity tools.  

We are considering basing our future development on _Windows_, for its
iconic interface (English is not the primary language of many of our users)
its support of migration to OS/2 (we need multitasking soon) and 'nice
purty windaws' to make all the managers happy.

We have some concerns:

1) We now use Turbo C, and enjoy its interactive environment - is something
   equivalent available under Windows?

2) Is the learning curve and daily development load of Windows so high we
   are shooting ourselves in the foot?

3) Are there modern evironments (C++, smalltalk, Actor) that will reduce our
   day to day engineering effort and support modular OOP methodologies?

4) Are there third party support tools (communication/graphics/hardware 
   libraries) that will make life easier?

5) Is Microsoft Customer Support an oxymoron?

While the creepingly elegant engineers around here chaff at signing up to 
the Microsoft/IBM/<leftoverCPM> world, all we have are PCs, so this may be 
our best choice.

If you like, email to me or post away on the net.

jgc@drizzle.cs.uoregon.cs

Thanks in advance.

		-jim campbell