Mathcad is advertised "You use it the same way you learned how to do mathematical calculations in the first place: on a scratchpad." You enter text, equations, functions, matrices, etc. in free form and answers are calculated automatically. Standard functions, matrices, statistical functions, curve-fitting, two and three dimensional plots, Fourier transforms, solving up to 50 simulataneous linear and nonlinear equations and inequalities with up to 50 variables, iterations, numerical integration and differentiation are features to both the DOS version 2.5 (demo contained in mcaddos.zip) and the MS Windows version 4.0 (demo contained in mcadwin.zip). There are symbolic capabilities in the latter version (contains the core functions of Maple's symbolic engine for deriving and simplifying formulas) which permits symbolic expanding, factoring, differentiation, integration, solution for a variable, substitute for a variable, expand to series, conver to partial fractions, etc. The Getting Started Handbook shows you some of the exciting things which can be done with the MS Windows version of Mathcad; to start this handbook, run the program and choose the item Getting Started from the Help menu.

An IBM compatible computer with 512K RAM is needed to run the DOS version and an 80386 or higher IBM compatible with at least 4 MB of memory and MS Windows version 3.1 or later is needed to run the MS WIndows version.

As would be expected with a demo a number of features of the program are disabled but there are a large number which are enabled to give the user a feel of the program.