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Comment by bredren | Hacker News Reader

In middle school, we had a math teacher with an old mac setup that ran a physics simulator program. It came with a variety of starter templates, one of them was this crash test dummy in a car.

It was all polygons, but you could hit run and the car would accelerate and hit a wall then the circle head and arms would sort of fly around.

Anyone know what this software was? I remember running and re-running little simulations repeatedly, with little understanding of the science but very much enjoying the ragdoll physics of it.

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Working Model, by Knowledge Revolution. I used to work there, and my first project was making the jump from 2D to 3D.

This is why I love this orange site.

Logged in users can change that color. For me it’s green.

Green is best, although that orange bar reminds me of Hercules monitors.

You’re missing out

Any stories / surprising bits from working there?

Oh man, there’s a 3D version? I has endless fun playing with the 2D one in the uni computer lab.

I was going to say Interactive Physics but I think that came prior to that, by the same people

https://www.design-simulation.com/wm2d/

I remember two programs like that, one that my middle school had called "Fun Physics," and one my high school had called "Conceptual Physics." The interfaces were exactly the same, and it wouldn't surprise me if Conceptual Physics was a rebundled version sold along with Paul Hewitt's course. Unfortunately, those names are so generic that I can't find them on Google.

You could author workspaces in Working Model and I dimly remember Fun Physics was built using WM.

Old software can frequently be found on archive.org—with much more focused selection than ‘the whole web’.

Oh wow, I remember this for sure. What a throw back. What was it called?

MATLAB or something from MathWorks?

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