Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!iuvax!bionet!national-institute-for-medical-research.mrc.ac.uk!n_brown From: n_brown@national-institute-for-medical-research.mrc.ac.uk (Nigel Brown) Newsgroups: bionet.software Subject: Mathematica (UK oriented) Message-ID: <8908142237.AA29709@nimsn41.> Date: 14 Aug 89 22:37:54 GMT Lines: 115 Some time ago I made a request on bio-software and on sun-spots for information about the algebraic and numerical maths package 'Mathematica', and about its availablity in the UK. Here is a summary of the information I have gathered from replies on these lists, and from the UK distributors mentioned below. Apologies to non-UK readers and non-Sun users. The makers are: Wolfram Research Inc., P.O. Box 6059, Illinois 61821 Tel. 010 217 398 0700 E-mail. windsor@wri.com, windsor@wri.uucp. In the UK it can be obtained from (there may be others): TMC (The MacSerious Company), P.O. Box 274, Glasgow G20 0TV Tel. 041 332 5622 Contact: Ephraim Borowski. and: Colin Grace Associates, 62 High St., Saffron Walden, Essex Tel. 0799 22532. There is also a book about it: "Mathematica" Stephen Wolfram Addison-Wesley 1988 and there have been reviews in: Nature, (early this year - can't remember which edition) Physics World, Vol 2, No 6, June 1989. A Mathematica User Group exists with a USENET newsgroup. Until April it used to be distributed by Sun, but one or other party pulled out of the arrangement. A demo disk is available for the Mac II from Wolfram, or, in the UK, from one of the above distributors. Ephraim Borowski (of Glasgow University) TMC was very helpful and sent us a free Mac II demo disk, and some information. The demo is nice but doesn't allow you to do any maths, since it consists of only preprocessed material. We also had a live demo from CGA, also on a Mac II, which was more informative. although we really would want to run it on a Sun. Sun versions didn't seem to be available in the UK as when I asked (they may be by now). It runs on Mac II's, Sun3's, Sun4's, the NeXT machine, and possibly others. Latest version is 1.2. On Suns it should support Sunview, X11, PostScript, TeX, tektronics. Approximate prices: Mac II #800 Sun3 #1800 Sun4 #2400 NeXT bundled as standard! These are in pounds, one off, very approximate, and don't include VAT or educational discount. Licensing is per cpu. Opinions on the net varied considerably: The program is in two parts: a kernel that does the crunching,and an interactive front end which is variable from m/c to m/c. Regarding the kernel I heard very little - some praise, no specific complaints, although there are some bugs apparently. One person thought Macsyma was better, another thought the reverse. BUT the front end and the pricing were very contentious... The Mac front end is the best developed (haven't heard from any NeXT users), with a fancy mouse, etc. driven interface and graphics capabilities. The Sun front end, however, consisted of just an interpreter and no nice graphics. I hear that the new X11 versions now available for Suns are better, but how much better I haven't found out. As for pricing, there has been a lot of traffic on sun-spots recently, the consensus being that the Sun price charged by Wolfram is exorbitant by comparison with the Mac price, especially in view of the poorer interface on Suns (which may have changed by now). The Sun4 version gives better performance over the Mac (4-20x faster, according to one user comparing a SparcStation 1 with a Mac II) from which it is argued that the Sun price is justifiable on performance grounds. The counter argument is that you pay Sun for the privelege of extra speed with their h/w, not the applications s/w company! In conclusion: We would want to run it on our Sun4's and access it via X-windows on various workstations. Because we wouldn't need its algebraic capablities, the status of the X-windows i/f is unsure, and the price is just too high anyway, we've decided not to buy, at least until (?) the price drops. If anyone finds out more I'd be interested to hear. The usual disclaimer... Thanks, ____________________________________________________________________________ SMAIL: Nigel P. Brown, Laboratory of Mathematical Biology, N.I.M.R., The Ridgeway, Mill Hill, LONDON NW7 1AA, U.K. Tel: (+44) 01-959 3666 ext 2295 JANET: n_brown@uk.ac.mrc.nimr INTERNET: n_brown%nimr.mrc.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk EARN/BITNET: n_brown%nimr.mrc.ac.uk@cunyvm.cuny.edu n_brown%nimr.mrc.ac.uk@ukacrl ____________________________________________________________________________