[scholia]

(1) "There Was a Time before Mathematica…"

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...