Macsyma (/ˈmæksɪmə/; "Project MAC's SYmbolic MAnipulator")[1] is one of the oldest general-purpose computer algebra systems still in wide use.
The 1982 version of MIT Macsyma remained available to academics and US government agencies, and it is distributed by the US Department of Energy (DOE).
The project was initiated in July, 1968 by Carl Engelman,[2] William A. Martin (front end, expression display, polynomial arithmetic) and Joel Moses (simplifier, indefinite integration: heuristic/Risch).
Macsyma was written in Maclisp, and was, in some cases, a key motivator for improving that dialect of Lisp in the areas of numerical computing, efficient compilation and language design.
In response to a request from Richard Fateman, then a professor at UC Berkeley, MIT provided a temporary license for Macsyma code in 1979.
With the papers in hand, Pavelle and Moses approached several venture capital firms that showed interest in funding a Macsyma startup.
It was evident that Symbolics was not so much interested in the code as in keeping Macsyma out of the software catalog of its competitor in the Lisp Machine business, LMI.
The business arrangement between Symbolics and Arthur D. Little required a royalty payment to ADL of 15% of Macsyma gross sales.
Despite resistance from many in Symbolics, Macsyma was released for DEC VAX computers and Sun workstations using Berkeley's Franz Lisp in the early to mid 80s.
Wolfram's SMP program and Waterloo Maple were growing at this time, although MACSYMA was easily superior to these other packages in symbolic math.
In the second half of 1986 Richard Petti became the manager of the Macsyma business to reduce the sales and avoid conflict with employees in Symbolics.
Macsyma cut headcount but expanded its sales force and marketing, and focused its developers more on features that customers asked for.
MACSYMA became more user friendly: documentation and on-line help were reorganized and expanded; some command names were changed to be more mnemonic.
Mastering symbolic math was a herculean task; but numerical capabilities were critical to get a piece of the much larger engineering and lower-end scientific markets.
However, the Macsyma staff was too small and lacked the mix of skills needed to add the kind of graphics, notebook interface and better numerics that Mathematica had.
(3) In moving to VLSI hardware in the mid-1980s, Symbolics converted from 36-bit word size to a 40-bit, without justification from the market for the enormous development cost of this change.)
After keeping reasonably quiet since 1986 about the product issues, Petti tried in late 1988 to persuade Symbolics to adopt a software-only or board-level strategy; but the fourth president in four years would hear nothing of it.
), Bill Gosper (special functions, summation), Howard Cannon (user interface, optimization), and several consultants.
Also, starting in 1992 or 1993, Mathsoft engaged in a strategy of spending $10 million on direct mail at very low prices, which won much of the remaining growth in the symbolic math market, just when Macsyma Inc. was struggling to rebuild its world-class product.
Downloadable executables for Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and other systems, including graphical user interfaces are available.