maw@pur-phy (Michael A. Wittenauer) (05/12/89)
Does anyone have, or know where I can acquire, a high level plotting package designed for engineering and scientific use, which runs under SCO Xenix 286 (2.2.3)? I am a scientist using Xenix in a laboratory setting and would like to be able to plot data on a display monitor as well as on a dot matrix printer (NEC p2200). I have the "Computer Graphics Interface" which came with the development system; but, it is only a sophisticated set of low level graphics subroutines. Since I am trying to spend my time doing science, I do not have the time to write my own high level code. Most of the commercially available packages are designed for business use; however, my needs do not revolve around pie and bar charts. The few available engineering/scientific packages are very expensive (>= $1000) and hence do not fit into my limited budget. There seem to be quite a few reasonably priced packages available to run under DOS but none that I have found to have been ported to Xenix. I know that someone has ported "gnuplot" from Unix to Xenix as I saw a Xenix archive index listing in which it was included. Unfortunately, the archive system (rpp386) apparently went off the air the day before I finally got a dial out version of uucp to work. Has anyone else fought with this problem? Is anyone else even trying to do laboratory science on a Xenix system? Is "gnuplot" for Xenix available? Has someone perhaps written plot software which uses SCO's CGI? Thanks in advance for the help. ========================================================================== Michael A. Wittenauer Internet: maw@maxwell.physics.purdue.edu Physics Dept. (voice) 317-494-5573 Purdue University ==========================================================================
gda@creare.UUCP (Gray Abbott) (05/13/89)
>Does anyone have, or know where I can acquire, a high level plotting package >designed for engineering and scientific use, which runs under >SCO Xenix 286 (2.2.3)? I am a scientist using Xenix in a laboratory setting >... Since I am trying to spend my time doing science, I do not have the >time to write my own high level code. >Most of the commercially available packages are designed for business >use; however, my needs do not revolve around pie and bar charts. >The few available engineering/scientific packages are very expensive >(>= $1000) and hence do not fit into my limited budget. There seem to be >quite a few reasonably priced packages available to run under DOS but none >that I have found to have been ported to Xenix... We are currently writing a package for the National Cancer Institute which addresses this problem. The system, called ML/e, is an upgrade of the MLAB (Modelling Laboratory) program used by many NIH researchers to analyze and graph laboratory data. ML/e includes a sophisticated mathematical parser, curve-fitting and optimization programs, and a graphics system, called YAGS, all of which communicate with each other through Unix pipes. YAGS allows you to interactively design plotting formats for your data, or you can use one of the "canned" formats provided, adding your own custom features. You work with high-level objects, like Datasets, Labels, Tic Marks, Axes, and 3D surfaces and contours, all the way down to lines and text. You can manually set positions, sizes, etc., or you can set them up in the ML/e parser. The parser is a kind of super-calculator, which works with vectors and matrices as easily as real and complex scalars. It provides lots of standard mathematical functions and also allows you to add new ones through external programs, using connecting pipes. It has programming features for flow control and so on. This code is not yet available, but it should be on the market sometime in the next year. We may need some beta sites; send me e-mail if you're interested. I don't know what the price will be, but it should be "competitive". >Is anyone else even trying to do laboratory science on a Xenix system? Good question. We were originally targeting large time-sharing systems and workstations, but we did the development on a 386 Xenix system, and we wonder if there's are potential users on that kind of system. It seems that a lot of scientists and engineers using PCs prefer MS/DOS. Who is doing science with these Xenix machines? What kind of science? How about engineering (we are using ML/e to solve problems in mechanical and fluids engineering)?