n_brown@NIMR.MRC.AC.UK (Nigel Brown) (05/23/89)
Hi! Does anyone know where we can get the 'Mathematica' package from in the UK? Who distributes it? What does it cost, etc.? Also, has anyone had much experience (good or bad) with it? We are thinking of putting it up on our Suns and would welcome any advice. We've already seen the book by Stephen Wolfram, and it looks good. Please reply in person and I'll summarise to the net. Thanks, ____________________________________________________________________________ Nigel P. Brown JANET: n-brown@uk.ac.mrc.nimr Lab. Mathematical Biology UUCP: Nat. Inst. Medical Research DARPA: n-brown%mrc.nimr@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk The Ridgeway Mill Hill LONDON NW7 1AA Tel: (+44) 01-959 3666 U.K. ext. 2295 ____________________________________________________________________________
n_brown@national-institute-for-medical-research.mrc.ac.uk (Nigel Brown) (08/15/89)
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
____________________________________________________________________________