It's all Waterloo-Maple's fault, really: if they had maintained a version of their computer algebra system for the Amiga, I wouldn't have found it necessary to switch to Mac. Or maybe it's Commodore's fault for mismanaging themselves into oblivion; I don't know. Either way, I became painfully aware three years ago that my little Amiga would no longer satisfy my computing needs. I needed a new home computer.The Problem
My biggest need was research. I didn't have the time or energy to program a complete symbolic computation package for the Amiga; besides, I wasn't supposed to program a symbolic computation package; I was supposed to use a symbolic computation package to research mathematics. There had been a version of Maple for the Amiga back in the early 90s, but by 2001 it was hard to come by. Waterloo-Maple didn't even reply to my email inquiring about it. The Amiga, alas, had to go.
Previous attempts at a solution
I'd had experience with Microsoft software, having once owned a Òbeige boxÓ back in the days of Windows 3.1, and of course it's nearly impossible to go through the world of computers without at least once using a Windows machine. My Programming 101 was done on MS-DOS machines that ran Borland's Pascal. Those frustrating experiences with MS-DOS and Windows drove me into the arms of Amiga: the first machine I ever used that, with its combination of pre-emptive multitasking, color GUI, and integrated command-line interface (unique on home computers of the time) felt neither like a straitjacket nor like an unmanageable nightmare. It was on the Amiga that I really sunk my teeth into programming, both in C and in Modula-2. It was with TDI's and later Benchmark's Modula-2 compilers that I wrote my first symbolic computation software: to handle arbitrary-precision integers, to manipulate continued fractions, and to draw the graphs of particular solutions to two-dimensional differential equations.
In the years since embracing Amiga, I had seen nothing from Microsoft to stimulate my enthusiasm for the Windows platform. So, Microsoft was off the table. In 2001, that left Linux and Apple.
My other criterion was that my new computer be portable: two months before, I had been visiting my parents' house. Driven by the desire to crack a problem, I stayed up all night reducing S-polynomials by hand. There is a reason we have computers, my friends: as I re-discovered the hard way, that reason is to make mathematics easier.
Why not Linux?
A few months prior, the symbolic computation professors at my university had purchased workstations for research purposes. This being a university, we decide things by general consensus -- i.e., the loudest voices win :-) The consensus was that, since (a) Linux was free, (b) the university offered a modified RedHat distribution, and (c) two of the grad students ran Linux boxes at home, we should standardize on Linux. At the time, Linux really did seem to be the wave of the future.
One professor dissented, and purchased three dual PowerMac G4s for his students. The professor most in favor of Linux chose what I consider to be a most curious argument to express his distaste for the Macs: they made us look "less professional, like a mathematics lab instead of a computer science lab." The fact that we computer algebra students are a lab in a mathematics department, and not a computer science department, didn't seem to impress him.
We did not purchase the machines all at once, but over a period of several months. The first two purchases went very well. Mine did not: at the time, X didn't support the Matrox Millenium G450 video card -- or at least, the X server provided by our university's version of Linux didn't. Realm Linux is closely tied to RedHat Linux; at the time I tried to install it, it was built from RedHat 6.something; today they build off Fedora.
I was a complete newbie to this; in more than ten years of using Amigas, I'd never had this problem (probably because I was lucky). I couldn't figure out how to make X and the G450 play nice, and there were working machines nearby, so -- I worked on those other machines. On occasion, I would try to figure the thing out, but to no avail. The two colleagues who had made the successful purchases, and who ran Linux workstations at home, were unhelpful. A third officemate finally took pity and sat down with it one morning. Late that afternoon, he figured out how to make the video card work with the X server, and Žowyn.math.ncsu.edu was finally online. (After graduation, this gentleman rather appropriately took a job with RedHat, testing the installation of the operating system on differently-configured systems.)
My advisor purchased a machine nearly identical to mine, but his difficulties were even worse. He gave up on Linux altogether and installed Windows on it. There were serious problems with that, too, but I'm not one to beat the dead horse of the problems with Microsoft's default security settings.
- "Apple in Academia, Page 1/3"
- "Apple in Academia, Page 2/3"
- "Apple in Academia, Page 3/3"
