Physics Plot - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Physics Plot is a software package designed for plotting scientific data. The software was developed by Dr. Charles D. Spencer (retired professor of physics

Physics

Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...

at Ithaca College

Ithaca College

Ithaca College is a private college located on the South Hill of Ithaca, New York. The school was founded by William Egbert in 1892 as a conservatory of music. The college has a strong liberal arts core, but also offers several pre-professional programs and some graduate programs. The college is...

) and his students. The software is marketed by Physics Academic Software. The program offers autoscaling, least square fitting, data manipulation, and function plotting.

History

Development of Physics Plot began in the early 1980’s. It was originally written using a combination of FORTRAN

Fortran

Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...

and machine code and ran on Technical Education Centers graphics hardware for S-100 bus

S-100 bus

The S-100 bus or Altair bus, IEEE696-1983 , was an early computer bus designed in 1974 as a part of the Altair 8800, generally considered today to be the first personal computer...

computers (IMSAI 8080

IMSAI 8080

The IMSAI 8080 was an early microcomputer released in late 1975, based on the Intel 8080 and later 8085 and S-100 bus. It was a clone of its main competitor, the earlier MITS Altair 8800. The IMSAI is largely regarded as the first "clone" computer. The IMSAI machine ran a highly modified version of...

). The software was eventually re-written using QuickBASIC

QuickBASIC

Microsoft QuickBASIC is an Integrated Development Environment and compiler for the BASIC programming language that was developed by Microsoft. QuickBASIC runs mainly on DOS, though there was a short-lived version for Mac OS...

so that it could run on 80286 PCs. Development then migrated to VisualBASIC to allow for a graphical user interface. Physics Plot was first made available for commercial sale in 1999 by Physics Academic Software.

History

External links

See also