Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Swt, Mthmtc on a Cntrs 650!

A while ago I busted out my Centris 650 and set it up on the desk where the Indigo20 was. I've mostly just been poking through the files I had on it, mostly lots of Text Adventure development stuff, but some others. One interesting thing I found was Mathematica 2.0. Now, if I remember right, I first found this a looooong time ago, on one of my many 40MB Syquest cartridges. It's an incredibly powerful program, even on a computer from the early 90s. Luckily I also have a nice big book, about fifteen hundred pages thick and twelve pounds or so full of Mathematica examples and whatnot. Unfortunately the book was written for Mathematica 5, not 2, so a lot of the fancier examples involving animations or audio manipulation don't really work. That said, there are a bunch of basic 3D and 2D graphing examples that do work, my favorite is:

Plot3D[Exp[-Sqrt[x^2 + y^2]],
{x, -2, 2}, {y, -2, 2}, Lighting -> False,
PlotPoints -> 50]

It creates a fairly high resolution graph of what I can only describe as a mountain. In any case, here's a somewhat low quality video of it graphing that object.

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