[ackerman at nlm.nih.gov: Using MinneView]

[mbp]

Regarding your question:

> On another note, we're curious here about how you came to use MinneView;
> how did you find out about it and how long have you been using it?

	Last summer I was working at Harry Diamond Labs, a U.S.
Army installation, in a department that was doing a lot of 
radar imaging and simulations.  They had begun using Mathematica
because it was very easy to take the mathematical equations for
the simulations and to write and modify their simulations.  They
had been using Tektronics terminals for display and a Convex for
crunching, but they had just recieved several SGI 4D machines.
	As you know Mathematica has a "live" mode on the Iris machines,
but it lacks certain features, like colored facets and other interfacing
features.  My mentor wanted me to figure something out and
"make it work" with lighting, colored facets, and a nice interface.
	It just happened that because of my own personal research
for my high school senior project I had been invited to the 
Regional Geometry Institute at Mount Holyoke.  Ken Brakke was there
demoing his Surface Evolver.  He was using an Iris with the
pipe to MinneView for display.
	When I got back to HDL I described the MinneView interface
and the display to my mentor who descided that this was exactly what
he needed.  I obtained a version of MinneView (compiled), and spent
the rest of the summer figuring out OOGL without any documentation.
I wrote a Mathematica -> OOGL conversion and a little fix to make
Mathematica run MinneView directly with temporary files.
	They have continued to us the MinneView display with
Mathematica for their simulations. I heard about GeomView because
I somehow got on the Geometry Center's mailing list so I saw the
article in the newsletter.

-Jeremy Ackerman