Richard Hess joined Consilium in two distinct phases of the same role. He started as a manager for the UI group, hiring and leading a team of 3 engineers. During this management period he was also doing hands-on technical work — using WINTERP for Motif prototyping and supporting libXPM when the original team lost funding.
He later transitioned to Staff Engineer, handing off management of the group to one of the engineers he had hired. In this individual contributor role he took on two of his most technically interesting projects of the era.
Consilium's primary product was a manufacturing automation system built on roughly a million lines of COBOL with a TTY-based terminal interface. The challenge was modernizing that interface without rewriting the underlying application.
Richard wrote a Motif application that read the TTY screen output from the COBOL application and generated a corresponding GUI — translating character-cell layouts into a graphical interface that roughly matched the original screen. This was the primary modernization path: keep the COBOL running, wrap it in a real windowing UI.
He also built a Smalltalk prototype for a client using ParkPlace Systems' VisualWorks environment. ParkPlace was one of the two major commercial Smalltalk vendors of the era (the other being Digitalk), having spun out of Xerox PARC to commercialize Smalltalk-80.