This is a software calculator program which runs on machines in the Mathematics Undergraduate Laboratory and which is also available on floppy disk to run on IBM compatible PC's under MS-DOS with a 386 or better CPU. It is a stack-based calculator, somewhat reminiscent of most Hewlett-Packard scientific calculators. It runs under the PostScript clone GhostScript, with the addition of a macro package calc.inc written especially for the course.
To run the version in the Laboratory, the full command is
gs -dNODISPLAY ~m307-ta/lib/calc.inc
This can be done in one short command as vc if you have not rewritten the .cshrc.custom file in your home directory. You can examine the file ~m307-ta/lib/calc.inc freely, and make a copy of it, but we may occasionally update or modify the single copy in the directory ~m307-ta. You can also get your own copy of calc.inc by getting the source right here and saving it to your own home directory.
The program GhostScript is normally used to interpret
graphics commands. Free interpreters for it are available
for UNIX, MSDOS, and Macs---see the
To obtain a floppy disk copy, bring a disk into the Undergraduate Laboratory and copy the contents of the directory \m307\gs386 from the IBM-type machine in the corner onto it. No login is necessary for this. Please do not modify the files in that directory!
The command line is the same in MS-DOS. Be sure to include the -dNODISPLAY option on the command line in MS-DOS, or the program will attempt to do graphics in a particularly messy way.
Detailed directions are in the file of notes A vector calculator.