The concept started in 1993 in Denmark with a project and patent from the original inventor. At that time his general idea was to perform isothermal extrusion using an IR sensor to measure changes in temperature on profiles at an extrusion press exit.  From this, the company Alu-Mac was formed.
The product developed was a single IBM PC with additional electronic cards to manage a single IR Pyrometer produced in-house
The solution had no storage and hence no recipes but with a manual setup for each die as it was loaded, it could perform temperature based extrusion and provide productivity gains to its users. With a working product many systems were installed throughout the US and Europe. 
Then in 2003 a group based in Dublin Ireland acquired the existing technology and developed a network (IP) communication based on the Microsoft Server structure with access terminals wherever needed. The concepts of isothermal extrusion were maintained and but dropped the self-built Pyrometer to utilise those from Land (UK), Williamson (US) and AST (Israel). Thus Optalex became a pure software company. The platform was Microsoft Server and Microsoft SQL running on a separate server. The software language used was Visual Basic (VB) with add-in’s to handle the graphical display functions from National Instruments. .
Development continued until mid 2010’s when deficiencies in VB became more apparent.C# (C sharp) was chosen as the new core software language - as used by Microsoft to produce Windows 11 and Windows Server.Terminal access changed to the browser with ‘Java Script’ providing all the graphical capability within. In short, C# to do all the computing and Java Script to manage all the advanced display functions.
The result was a more flexible better performing platform on which to move forward
This rewrite allowed the development of some key features - the prime example is the Dashboard where a live display shows the current shift / last 24 hours in a way that every billet pushed, every downtime, every die change, every dead time is shown. If the user hovers their mouse over any of the above they get a pop-up showing all the additional detail. If the hover over a downtime they get the downtime reason and if they click on the feature they get even more detail. 
For an extrusion manager, glancing at this display provides an immediate feedback on the days performance - the problems stand out and some mouse movement provides additional detail.