Maple on the Next Machines

Instructions for the use of Maple V on the NeXT machines in room 200 SEO. Send comments and suggestions to Neil.E.Berger@uicvm.uic.edu
Log onto any NeXT machine.
If the screen is black, then nudge the mouse. You will see a login screen come up. Enter the name of your account. Be sure to use lower case. Your account is named guest and the password will be given to you at each session.

Setting up your machine as you like it.

After you have logged on and the machine has come to life, there will be a set of icons along the rhs of the screen. The file viewer application will be in the center of the screen. Using the mouse, move the pointer to the rhs of the screen and double click (DC) on the icon which has a date and time. This will cause a "menu" of choices of things you can do with the currently selected application to come up on the upper lhs of the screen. Use the mouse to click on preferences. You may set screen color etc. to your liking, change the password, etc. To make this application go away click on "quit" at the bottom of this menu.

Running Maple V

Your home directory, which has all the files that you save, will be a picture of a little house. You will be looking for the folder called LocalApps. You must go down the directory tree to get to this folder. Look for the icon called "babe". If you do not see it, then use the slider bar in the file viewer and move it to the left until you see babe. DC on babe (which is the server machine and contains all the software you will usually use.) Look for the folder called LocalApps. DC on that folder. You will see all sorts of local apps icons appear. Use the slider (by grabbing it with the mouse), if you need to, to look at the ones below the bottom of the window. Look for the Math folder (it has all kinds of math symbols in it) DC on this folder. You should see a new set of folders, one of which is a Maple leaf. Using the mouse and holding the left button down, drag that icon to the "dock" along the rhs of your screen. Place it at the bottom of all the icons along the right side. From now on you can get into Maple by clicking on that Maple leaf icon on the side of the screen. It will remain in that position unless you drag it away from the dock, in which case it will disappear. Next minimize the local apps window by clicking on the x at the lhs top of that window. The minimized window will appear at the lhs bottom of the screen. You can recover it latter by clicking on its icon. In general you can move windows around by clicking, holding and then dragging the window by the bar at the top. To start Maple V DC on the icon you have placed on the rhs of the screen (or you could have DC on the icon in the LocalApps folder.)

What to do now that you are in Maple V

When you are in Maple the menu on the lhs of the screen will change to reflect the choices related to Maple. A New session window will automatically be started. To enter an expression and have Maple evaluate you must use the ENTER key on the extreme rhs of the key board to the right of the numeric keypad. This is different from the ENTER key on the typewriter keyboard which we will call the "newline" key == NEWLINE. If you want to enter several lines of input and then have Maple evaluate them as a group you would do as follows: Enter one line, then hit the NEWLINE key. Next, enter additional lines. In each case to get a new line hit the NEWLINE key. When you are satisfied, and want to have these several lines evaluated, you can hit the ENTER key on the rhs of the keypad. If you look at the menu associated with Maple you will see many choices related to your Maple application. You may click the mouse on any of these to invoke them, OR you may use the ALT key PLUS the indicated letter to invoke them. For example, to print the current window you would use ALT-p. To hide the current window use ALT-h, and to quit the Maple App use ALT-q or click on the quit bar. Remember that the control key CTRL is rarely used in a NextStep session, but the ALT key is universally used in many commands. You may use the mouse to select text and then paste the text to some other window. To select the text first click and drag the mouse over the text you want to select. you may then use the "Edit" button bar to cut and paste the text elsewhere. For example to cut text from the help files for "plot3d" do the following: First open the help file for plot3d by typing in: ?plot3d ENTER A help window will come up. Scroll thru the window until you are at the bottom where all the examples are located. Select an example by dragging the mouse to select a portion of the text. Use ALT-c to copy the text to a buffer. Next click on the spot in the worksheet where you want to insert the lines. The use the keys ALT-v to paste the text into the active Maple window. Next use ENTER to evaluate the graph.

Leaving Maple

To leave Maple and perhaps log out of the machine, you must select quit on the Maple menu bars along the lhs of the screen. Next you must Logout of the machine. Do this by clicking on the NEXTSTEP icon on the top of the icon dock. A menu will come up. One of the choices will be "quit". You may click on that, or you may use the key-strokes ALT-q to quit.