🚀 go-pugleaf

I need to make 3-D plots from a huge collection of data points. I'd like
a simple scatter plot, then something like a propagation curve, and finally 
a surface.  It seems like this shouldn't be so difficult, but i can't
seem to get what i want out of either Matlab or Mathematica. Both these
programs are great for plotting surfaces generated from some analytic
function, but what does one do if one wants to overlay data???
I did manage to get a scatter plot out of mathematica on a small subset
of data, but this involved a fair bit of work turning each coordinate
individually into a Point{x,y,z} type object. To group data into lines
after that required stripping off the Point tag, also a massive time sink.
With matlab, i can only plot z-values on an evenly-spaced grid.

Any suggestions??? What am I doing wrong? What applications do people use
to plot 3-D data points, and how does one go about it?  Any and all
thoughts appreciated, the sooner the better, i'm really getting desperate...  
Thanks,

	-deb summa
	debs@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu

PS- I'm on a Mac II type system (accelerated SE)