Cambridge, Massachusetts-based MathSoft Inc has announced Mathcad 6.0 for Windows, software that performs a variety of elaborate mathematical calculations, with a World Wide Web capability to attract new users. Lotus Notes has also been integrated into the product and MathSoft, which has suffered successive losses over the last two years, is hoping that it and other features of Mathcad 6.0, will return it to profit. The firm, a developer of technical calculation software and publisher of electronic books, launched Mathcad 5.0 in March last year and with Mathcad 6.0 wants to push into the higher education market, a new one for the company. It will offer the product in two versions: a Plus for experienced users, and the Standard Edition. It will also offer a s tripped-down version for university students, who regularly need to perform some kind of mathematics in their course work. Part of Matchcad 6.0 Plus is a proprietary programming language, for highly experienced users that want to create more complex applications. Notes in both versions, said MathSoft, will enable users to share their work, something that until now has not been possible with traditional calculation software.

Embedded programming

Unperturbed by IBM Corp’s proposed acquisition of Lotus Development Corp and what might happen to Notes, MathSoft’s president and chief executive Chuck Digate said that since IBM has a very strong sales organisation selling into the technical market, this could only help sales of Mathcad. With these new features, says Digate, a multinational company that develops a particular formula, say to calculate the weight of an anchor, can post that formula on the World Wide Web or post it to its Notes database, so that everyone that will need to use the formula can have easy access to it. By inserting a URL Universal Resource Locator address into any Mathcad document, users can hyperlink any section of a document to a document on the Web. This facility also means that users can import information from Web pages. MathSoft has introduced the new embedded programming language because of user pressure. MathSoft had resisted the idea because it didn’t think it was necessary, but experienced users of previous editions had asked for a facility to enable them to create their own Mathcad applications, so the company relented. MathSoft describes it as a simple, but elegant way of combining variables with existing functions and it has the capacity to enable functions to call themselves or to define a function in relation to itself. Other new features in both versions include 120 QuickSheets, pull down information on all the program’s functions; new analysis and statistical modelling functions; three-dimensional graphics; tab dialogue interfaces; and animation. Mathcad documents can be exported to Windows-based applications and re-edited; previously such documents were exported as bit maps. Digate, who joined Mathsoft nine months ago, says a direct sales policy had led to the losses but version 6.0 will be sold as a retail product in the US and through distributors in Europe, and this should improve sales by creating a broader market in its existing technical base of engineers and scientists; reaping dividends through upgrades of its 500,000-plus installed base worldwide; and boost sales in higher education market. Mathcad, he said, is already the most popular calculation software among what has been Mathsoft’s traditional technical users, but that in the US alone there were 13m students in a variety of disciplines that had to carry out some kind of calculations in the course of their studies. Mathcad does have some market presence in the US educational market but it wants to double its market share to 40%. Mathcad 6.0 is in final beta testing at the moment and will ship in July. It will be available under Windows 3.1, Windows for Workgroups, Windows NT and Windows95; it is a 32-bit applications. There will also be a Mac OS version next year, but not one for OS/2, which MathSoft doesn’t believe is robust enough to handle Math

cad. The Plus version is ú400, the Standard, out in August, will be ú200. Upgrades will be ú140 and ú70 respectively.