Macsyma

On 2/13/26 8:56 AM, Andreas Eder (as a_eder_muc at web dot de) wrote:
> On Fr 13 Feb 2026 at 03:59, David McClain (as dbm at refined-audiometrics dot com) wrote:
>
>> For many years, I was an avid user of Macsyma. It ran on Windows PC at the time. It was a fabulous system.
>> Interesting to see that Macsyma is still available.
> There also is a open version: maxima.
> Have a look at https://maxima.sourceforge.

A huge amount of improvements were made in the commercial version of 
Macsyma, including after it left Symbolics. I think they may have all 
been lost since that business    folded. Today of course, Macsyma is 
about 30 years out of date and behind the times. People still find even 
the open source version very useful, though.

Your next question might be wondering about getting the commercial stuff 
folded back into the free version. I don't have any idea about that, but 
will note that for its entire history, the licensing was a total 
nightmare. Maybe it would be possible to get past that at this point. 
The result could be very useful. I would still observe that while it is 
a useful tool, Macsyma is very limited in scope compared to certain 
commercial CAS.
(For example, the user interfaces. And no AI, which is a mouthful and I 
do not mean LLMs). But, ya know, calculus still works even when not 
dressed up.

I think Macsyma might be owned by the entity that now also owns the 
Symbolics IP. If that's the case, maybe it will get released under some 
license. If so, that still might not make it possible to re-integrate it 
with "Maxima".


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