This book includes a number of computer programs. These programs are used for illustration and as exercises, but they should also be useful for reference. While they cannot be guaranteed, they worked for me when I generated many of the figures in this book, and they should work for you. You will notice that they are in a language similar to Fortran. The language is described in an appendix. Since everyone has different facilities for graphical output, to use these programs yourself, you will have to understand them well enough to direct their outputs into your plotting equipment.
A movie is really a stack of pictures. In a computer it is just a three-dimensional matrix of floating point numbers that must somehow be converted to brightness pixels (pic ture el ements). At the time of writing, few people are equipped to directly convert such a three-dimensional matrix into a movie. In our laboratory (Ottolini et al. [1984]) this is done on a high-quality video computer terminal (AED 512). Movie capability is a valuable asset. It enhances our understanding of our data and of the processing. Students are inspired by seeing their programming work result immediately in a movie, which is easily videotaped. Compared to other graphical devices this one is easy to maintain. It is used by both research students and students in the master's degree program, who use it for homework exercises.
The cost of such equipment, including the direct memory access (DMA) computer interface, is less than $10,000. For a really good experience with movies, you should also have physical control of a computer with a memory greater than a few megabytes. If you don't already have this, the price (1985) increases by about a factor of ten.