Research Systems announces major release of industry-leading scientific and engineering software.

BOULDER, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 25, 1995--Research Systems Inc. Tuesday announced IDL 4.0, a major new release for scientists, engineers, and professional programmers that enhances data analysis & visualization and speeds application development.

IDL 4.0 will begin shipping in May. Cost is $1,500 for Windows, Windows NT, Macintosh, and native Power Macintosh versions (North America). Unix and VMS workstation versions start at $3,000.

IDL 4.0 includes: high-performance methematics and statistics that meet or exceed the capabilities of dedicated analysis packages; application connectivity that lets users call outside programs or embed IDL as a graphics engine; and scientific improvements that sharpen research insights.

"IDL 4.0 gives technical professionals high-performance tools that speed development efforts," remarked Peter Hallett, RSI's director of marketing. "Robust, cross-platform data analysis and visualization applications are built in a fraction of the time that it takes in C or Fortran."

IDL 4.0 Primary Advantages:

-- IDL's powerful graphics, plotting, image processing, and numerics are easily accessible, as an "engine" or library, from developers' C or FORTRAN programs. This flexible connectivity is delivered as a Windows DLL, UNIX shareable object library, and Macintosh AppleScript.

-- All-inclusive analysis including 50 new statistics functions commonly used by scientists and engineers such as: correlation analysis, hypothesis testing, multivariate analysis, probability functions, statistical fitting, and time series analysis & forecasting.

-- Fully-indexed on-line manuals with Hypertext links allow users to efficiently navigate IDL documentation and easily print hardcopy pages or entire sections.

-- Organizations with a mix of platforms can use IDL's enhanced application development tools to rapidly build IDL applications in one operating system and distribute versions with native "look & feel" to users on other platforms.

-- New scientific & engineering features solidify IDL's dominance as a computation and visualization environment. Just a few of the new features are listed below:

o Support for Double Precision Complex numbers increases the accuracy of iterative calculations used in the simulation of complex systems.

o Native support of missing data simplifies calculations and visualization of sparse datasets. The IEEE NaN (not a number) value represents missing data.

o Spherical gridding, useful to researchers with global-scale data, automatically interpolates irregularly-gridded data into regular grids.

-- The most current versions of HDF, CDF, and netCDF are fully supported. With the best scientific data support of any commercial application, IDL 4.0 makes it easy to read and write these powerful and complex formats.

-- Programmers can visually debug progam syntax using IDL's cross-platform code editors, cutting compile times by up to 50 percent. Almost unlimited file sizes can be handled.

-- New cross-platform interface controls bring native "look & feel" to Motif, Windows and Macintosh applications built in IDL.

-- Improved debugging support gives Windows and Macintosh programmers increased productivity in a sophisticated development environment.

IDL is the original computing environment for R&D engineers and scientists. It includes a rich suite of mathematics, statistics, graphics, image processing, mapping, and general data manipulation in a single, high-performance package. IDL's unmatched flexibility allows users to interactively analyze and visualize data and develop portable applications in a fraction of the time it takes in traditional languages. -0-

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CONTACT: Research Systems Inc., Boulder

Jim Wilson, 303/786-9900