Re: Macsyma
"Christopher Stacy (as cstacy at dtpq dot com)" <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.lisp.lispworks.general |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On 2/13/26 11:48 AM, David McClain wrote: > 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? MACSYMA was a 1968 project at Project MAC at MIT. Not sure who provided the initial funding, but probably ARPA (aka DARPA aka DOD), and probably the Navy was the contract monitor. At some point, the Department of Energy (DOE) provided some funding. Project MAC turned into the Laboratory for Computer Science and the AI Lab. The ARPANET came along: government research labs, mostly based at or affiliated with Universities, that's all who was on the ARPANET) and people wanted to use the program. It only ran on a PDP-10 computer at MIT, so a Consortium was created to buy a bigger computer for those ARPANET users on which to run and develop MACSYMA. That's all there was for a long time. (The system it was originated and developed on was ITS, which is why this conversation exists -- file systems.) Eventually MACSYMA was ported to the Lisp Machine, and the VAX. MIT licensed the UC Berkeley VAX port to a bunch of universities on a temporary basis. Then MIT gave Symbolics the exclusive rights, and there were big fights. UC Berkeley worked with DOE to get a version of MACSYMA licensed for general use, this was colloquially called "DOE MACSYMA" and was the basis of the open-source "Maxima" that's out there today. _______________________________________________ Lisp Hug - the mailing list for LispWorks users [email protected] http://www.lispworks.com/support/lisp-hug.html