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Currently Mathematica and Mathcad are the only two mathematical packages fully supported by IT Division, and users are encouraged to use either of them when performing complex mathematical computations. Indeed the software is centrally available on both NICE and public UNIX services, and usage questions are answered by the corresponding support lines. The primary contact person for these tools on NICE is C.Eck, and, under UNIX, M.Guijarro.

MatLab is a third competing package providing similar functionality to these two, and in this respect there are no current intentions to open any level of support for it to discourage diversification. However it is acknowledged that some users may welcome the different interface and/or facilities provided to perform mathematical computations.

In order to satisfy the demands of its modest user community (about 21 users, mostly in EP and SL divisions), version 4.2 has been available on NICE for a while on an "as is" basis. Five licenses have been negotiated to make MatLab version 5 available on CERN's UNIX platforms (with the exception of AIX) in the same spirit. Also the User Support Bookshop was distributing the Student Edition of MatLab 5 (PC) including the accompanying manual.

In order to rationalize access to the MatLab software and align to the current release, the following actions will be taken as of January 1999:

1. Removal of the obsolete version 4.2 from NICE, limiting access to the PC version to the Student Edition distributed by the Bookshop.
2. Availability of version 5 on UNIX machines with access from the ASIS software repository (it seems to work well on systems like HPPLUS).

In absence of other levels of support, and to facilitate exchanges of user experiences with the product, we have established a Usenet newsgroup called cern.matlab, and a mailing list mirroring it, called cern-matlab@listbox.cern.ch. This means that in order to communicate with other members of the MatLab community, you may either post a message to the newsgroup or send a standard e-mail to its mirror mailing list. To get the information, depending on your information processing style, you may want to:

• read actively the newsgroup through a news agent (e.g. Netscape),
• or subscribe to the mailing list and then receive the user exchanges via e-mail.

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