Re: Macsyma

It was my early impression that Macsyma, as I used it, was an outgrowth of a Navy research program. So some portion must belong to all of us? 

My first encounters were very eye opening. I had PhD level training in Math for Physics (mostly aimed at QED). But there were still many things I had never seen before. Macsyma firmly cemented my notions that everything in Physics is connected, stemming from some more abstract higher level stuff.

When I started using Macsyma, I was also just learning about Lisp. I had an employee who did his PhD in Lisp and Compiler Theory, and he was constantly ragging about how superior everything is in Lisp. After a year of his pestering, I finally bit the bullet and discovered Harlequin Lisp.

(I do now agree wholeheartedly with him…)

> On Feb 13, 2026, at 09:02, Christopher Stacy <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 
> 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 Today of course, Macsyma is about 30 years out of date and behind the times.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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