Christian et al,
sorry for the somewhat off-topicness:
On Jun 21, 2015, at 5:56 PM, Christian Gauger-Cosgrove
<captainkirk...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The RPi comes with a free full version of Mathematica? That intrigues
> me; I've never used it before but I hear it's similar to MAPLE? (Then
> again in terms of CAS's I'm quite happy with the one on my TI-89
> Titanium.)
I believe the version of Mathematica is a full version. It did not come
bundled, but here’s the Wolfram page describing it and pointing to the
Raspberry Pi foundation (but not to the correct link for downloading
mathematica):
http://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/
Our Raspberry Pi came with a flash card containing NOOBS, which allowed us to
download and install our choice of several operating systems. We chose
Raspbian, then downloaded and installed Mathematica. We solved a pretty small
amount of trouble getting the icons to show up on the desktop, then I
downloaded my largest and most complex Mathematica notebook which ran (well,
crawled) without modification.
Hm, on investigating, I think it actually is included in Raspbian now. If not,
https://www.raspberrypi.org/mathematica-10/
may help.
FWIW, Beaglebone Black is rumored to have a Mathematica port in the works:
http://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/386736
Mathematica is similar to Maple from what I hear. I have not used Maple, though.
In addition to the TI CAS’s you are familiar with, here is another option:
http://maxima.sourceforge.net
Free, runs on Windows/Linux/Mac/Android and source is available. I have tested
briefly on my Mac OS X.9.5 and on my Moto X cellphone on Androiod 4.2, no
problems so far. Likely not as powerful as Mathematica, but certainly has many
of the same building blocks, so if you want to test computer-based CAS with
little cost/hardware investment, this might be useful.
> The mod that does FORTH on a 6502 is a bit dead. Right now the "best"
> you can get is Lua. Yo uneed an obsolte version of MineCraft to use
> old RedPower 2 (which has the 6502 and FORTH interpreter). I think
> V1.4.6?
Hm. Lua is still interesting. Will also has a TI-Nspire calculator which will
run Lua as well as its own CAS system. That might be a really neat tie-in.
(Back on topic)
> Have you tried setting him at a PDP-8 or PDP-11 simulator yet? Much
> more productive than Minecraft, and if you can find a simulator that
> also simulates a front panel…
Sounds fun, but I’m a bit nervous about putting in that effort if it attracts
him no more than Cardiac in Java did. But I’ll keep the suggestion in mind! I
do have a pair of TRS-80 Color Computers and an assembly language cartridge;
he showed not much interest there, so I’m not confident the PDP simulations
would do much better.
- Mark
