Abstracts from a Minisymposium on Integrated Environments for Scientific Computing held October 14, 1987 during the SIAM 35th Anniversary Meeting Denver, CO.

An integrated computing environment is a highly interactive system in which a user can easily manipulate data and perform "experiments" without the tedium of writing and debugging programs. Recent hardware and software advances such as bit map displays and window systems have greatly enhanced such environments, making it possible for the user to manage many pieces of data (both text and graphics) on the screen simultaneously. Such environments have recently become available for doing various types of mathematical computing (e. g. MATLAB, MathCAD, MathScribe). The purpose of this minisymposium is to explore what issues this technology must face in the next 5 years in order to build useful systems for scientists and engineers.