🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <81@sierra.stanford.edu> siegman@sierra.UUCP (Anthony E. Siegman) writes:
>
>In Germany in 1984 a colleague showed me a version of "TK/Solver!"
>(sp?) for the Macintosh which ran on a 512K Fat Mac, and impressed
>me very much.  You typed all the equations for a given problem into
>an Equation Window.  These did not have to be simple assignment
>statements, or be entered in any special order; you could type
>equations like
>
>     sin(2*pi*x+theta) + c = a*x^2 + b*y^2
>
>with functions and variables on both sides of the = sign.
 
[ description of TK/Solver, Eureka deleted ]

>are becoming available now, though Mathematica is very much more
>expensive and requires a fully loaded Mac II.  But why did
>TK/Solver! or some similar program for the Mac never take off the
>way spreadsheets did?  Are there just a lot more business and
>financial spreadsheet customers than scientific and engineering
>customers out there? Or was it just a fluke that this idea did not
>get picked up by others and spread more widely?  Even with
>Mathematica today, I'll still like to have a small, simple,
>inexpensive TK/Solver! descendent to run on my Mac Plus.  What
>happened?
>
>--------

TK!Solver was a nice program for the mac, but departed rather severely from the
Apple interface guidelines and  seemed to suffer as a result.  I bought it at
closeout prices and used it occasionally, although it is showing its age.
The product has since been bought by a new company which is about to release
an updated version; in fact they have versions for IBM, Mac, Sun, and Vaxen,
as well as libraries of "SolverPacks" for specific disciplines. The company
is:
	Universal Technical Systems, Inc.
	1220 Rock St.
	Rockford, Illinois 61101 USA
	(815) 963-2220

and in Europe:

	Universal Technical Software (UK) Ltd.
	TSL House, Freebournes Court
	Newland Street, Witham, Essex CM8 2BL
	United Kingdom
	Phone: (0376)500035

The standard price for the Mac version is $395, although there is an upgrade
price for previous owners ($200) and an educational discount of a flat %40
(nice!) which also applies to the upgrade price. There is also a "miniTK demo
version" for $20.

I haven't received my copy yet (supposed to ship in March) and when I do
I'll post some conclusions if anybody's interested.

About Eureka:  I bought it because TK!Solver didn't have complex number
capability, but it never lived up to its promise.  It was quirky and not
very "pretty", and Apple's System >= 6.0 caused it to bomb.  I complained
about this to Borland about a year ago (and again last month) and I just
received version 1.01; identical to 1.0 except it works under the new System
software. Don't know why it took a year to fix...
Anyway, I hope TK!Solver does what I need, because Eureka's not too great a
product and I need a good equation solver.

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| Glen Rosendale	|    UC Berkeley	|  glen@cory.berkeley.edu     |
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