Well, after about 3 hours of trying to get Windows XP and my TI-89 to get along (not having the CD that came with the link didn''t help) I finally got it working. Link up to grab some images for a report I''m doing, and there the crapiest looking things I have ever seen; which I should have guessed from the screen resolution but didn''t think about it. So I start looking for free software that can do this for me. Everything that is free is command line based, and seems to be geared towards crunching billions of numbers to produce a result instead of graphical representations. The only GUI based one that had any decent abilities (or claimed to) required some dynamic link library I didn''t have. Anyone know of FREE software that can give me various graphical displays (and showing a few calculated values would be nice to) similar to that on a TI calculator. (I have a 89, but 93''s seem to have just as many features.) Thanks.

Ever hear of Matlab? Great package for doing calcs and graphing, but not free. But, good news. A coworker told me recently about a freeware package called Octave that is very similar to Matlab---basically a free clone that may have some limitations. It uses Gnuplot for graphing, so you''d have to figure out how to install/run both Octave and Gnuplot. But, once you have it up and running its quite powerful indeed.

I''ll also point out a package called DPLOT, that I believe has the ability to plot functions. It used to be free, but isn''t now. But its pretty cheap. Try the eval version first.

If you''re curious, you can download the trial version of Matlab from The MathWorks



Graham Rhodes
Principal Scientist
Applied Research Associates, Inc.

Just as grhodes_at_work said, MATLAB is the best program for this that I know of. Mathematica is also very good, but also not free. Same with Maple.

However there are another couple free math programs besides Octave

Maxima
Scilab

For further research I''d point you to Guide to Available Mathematical Software maintained by NIST, however non-free programs are also listed there.

Thanks for the helpful replies...

I ended up just using the crap picture that I captured off my TI-89. I would guess we will be the only ones with any graphics at all in our report though, so that should win us some points, even if the pictures arn''t great.

Wow, that R looks preaty nice.

Kinda weird name though. Not exactly something original.

AP, your quite a guy. Some days I want to send you money, other days I want to send you malicious programs...

Thanks!