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MacBALSA was written by Marc H. Brown <mhb@ariba.com> as part of his
thesis work at Brown.  This software is capable of performing very
sophisticated algorithm animations.  The following article contains a
good description of the software.

    Marc H. Brown, "Exploring Algorithms Using Balsa-II", IEEE
    Computer, May 1988, 14-36.

The enclosed balsa-manual.pdf gives a less technical description of
the software.  Please note that it contains Marc Brown's old address.
His current address is <mhb@ariba.com>.  It also contains some
warnings against copying the software.  Marc has assured me that it is
OK to copy the software.  I hope to replace this manual with an
updated version that corrects these errors.

It seems that MacBALSA was meant to accompany Sedgewick's Algorithms
book.

    Robert Sedgewick, "Algorithms", Addison-Wesley, second edition,
    1988, ISBN 0-201-06673-4.

(There are variants called Algorithms in C, Algorithms in C++, and
Algorithms in Modula-3.)  The algorithms are organized by chapter
number in this book.  It also appears that MacBALSA was the source for
many of the figures in the text.

This is version 1.0 of MacBALSA.  I produced this version using
version Aleph 4 of the source code.  It will run on a 68K or Power
Macintosh that has the Thread Manager installed.  Most Macintoshes
produced within the past few years come with the Thread Manager
installed.

Newer releases of the MacOS had rendered version Aleph 4 of MacBALSA
fairly unstable.  In this version I have corrected all of the
stability problems that I could identify.  I have fixed a number of
bugs.  I also changed the software so that it uses threads when
running algorithms.  Please let me know if you discover any problems.

Rick Zaccone
zaccone@bucknell.edu
June 25, 1998