Symbolic Manipulation Program, usually called SMP, was a computer algebra system designed by Chris A. Cole and Stephen Wolfram at Caltech circa 1979.
It was initially developed in the Caltech physics department with contributions from Geoffrey C. Fox, Jeffrey M. Greif, Eric D. Mjolsness, Larry J. Romans, Timothy Shaw, and Anthony E. Terrano.
Inference further developed the program and marketed it commercially from 1983 to 1988, but it was not a commercial success, and Inference became pessimistic about the market for symbolic math programs, and so abandoned SMP to concentrate on expert systems.
[2][3] SMP follows a rule-based approach, giving it a "consistent, pattern-directed language".
[7] SMP has been criticized for various characteristics, notably its use of floating-point numbers instead of exact rational numbers, which can lead to incorrect results,[8] and makes polynomial greatest common divisor calculations problematic.