🚀 go-pugleaf

stuarts@landau.ucdavis.edu (Stuart Staniford-Chen) writes:
: I saw a little bit in NeXTWorld about Mathematica 2.1 and the Mathematica
: Plus support program.  It sounds good but there is very little detail and
: I haven't received any notice from Wolfram.  So, has anybody got this yet,
: how much is it going to cost us, and how good is it?  (Sorry if this is
: old news but I haven't read the newsgroups lately).

The Mathematica Plus program should have been described fairly well
in your original Mathematica distribution kit.  The info is on a large
gray card with (no surprise) Mathematica Plus Program printed at the top.
M+ basically entitles you to free upgrades (they say at least twice per
year but I would guess that is *quite* optimistic), technical notes
and a newsletter (called MathUser).  To order the program call 
1-800-441-MATH.

I do not know how worthwhile the program is because I chose not to spend my
precious $ this way.  Instead I signed up for the Mathematica mailing list
and bought all of the NeXT specific documentation (which is excellent in my
opinion).  

As for the cost of the M+ program, or of Mma 2.1, I can't say because I
**have** received notices about it, three in fact (I'm the registered owner
of two Mma licenses) but the price was not the same in all of the releases
so I'm unsure which price applies.  My *guess* is that if you're an educa-
tional customer then Mma 2.1 is $50 US, which I would say is money extremely
well spent.  I was somehwat involved in helping some people at WRI determine
how well 2.1 works on the NeXT and I can tell you that the symbolic integra-
tion routines work MUCH better, that many of the linear algebra routines
are significantly improved in both speed and memory (for example, I had a 
test of LinearSolve on a matrix of complex doubles and it went about two
orders of magnitude faster under 2.1 --- which just tells you it was basically
"broken" under 2.0) and that the contour plotting is --- this is hearsay, but
I have no reason to doubt it --- much much better (given the poor state of
contour plotting on the NeXT this last one could be quite useful to 
anyone in the edu community).  If you don't get anotice from WRI in the 
next 7-10 days I suggest you give them a call and ask about 2.1  Hold out
for getting the upgrade for $50 if you can.  

Hope this is Helpful 

tom