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by Create
3842 days ago
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The issue is misattributions and misappropriations.
And those should be (and are) wrong, esp. in science. Taking the spirit of the times, ie. migrating software from minis to micros/pc^1-s in both cases and expropriating and monopolizing is not about simply copying, nor evolution in the best sense. ^1 https://xkcd.com/386/ |
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Wolfram's blog post says he discovered "a program called Macsyma — that did algebra, and could be used interactively. I was amazed so few people used it. But it wasn’t long before I was spending most of my days on it."
Later: "I got more and more ambitious, trying to do more and more with Macsyma. Pretty soon I think I was its largest user. But sometime in 1979 I hit the edge; I’d outgrown it."
Later: "And after a little while I decided that the only way I’d really have a chance to get what I wanted was if I built it myself. And so it was that I embarked on what would become SMP (the “Symbolic Manipulation Program”)."
Mathematica came after SMP.
Sounds like a fairly familiar software story, no?
(1) http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2013/06/there-was-a-time-befo...