[Axiom-developer] Re: Why Did Mathematica Win?

[TimDaly]

On Oct 28, 12:32 pm, Mark Lawton <address@hidden> wrote:
> There was plenty of maths software around before 1988, when
> Mathematica was released - so why did Mathematica become so dominant?
> Didn't the older software run on DOS (perhaps the other programs were
> too big to run on a 1980s PC - but if so, then they should have built
> "light" versions)? Perhaps they were too specialised? Was Mathematica
> the first to implement a GUI (graphical user interface)?
>
> What was it that allowed a start-up to beat rival software that had
> been around for over 20 years?

Axiom was known as Scratchpad at the time and started around 1971 at
IBM
Research. Scratchpad was research software and was freely available.
I sent out magnetic tapes of the sources.

We were not trying to make a commercial product. We were trying to
understand the relationship between mathematics and computers since
computational mathematics was a very new field.

We did try to market Axiom through IBM sales but the sales department
had programs that checked the required documentation to make sure it
was readable "at the 8th grade level". Clearly this was not possible.

Axiom ran on DOS, but only in my office. The DOS version was never
released. This included the X front-end graphics and help systems.

Axiom was released as a commercial product due to a drop in funding,
both from government sources and IBM directly. We eventually sold the
rights to the Numerical Algorithms Group. Axiom was one of "the big 3"
(Mathematica, Maple, and Axiom) at the time.

Axiom was withdrawn from the market in 2000 and released as open
source.

Axiom is extremely strongly typed, allowing overload selection not
only
by the operand types but also by the return type. This is not yet
widely
available in most languages. It is built around an algebra core and
assumes
you know what mathematical concepts like "Ring" mean. The learning
curve
is rather steep because you need both a strong computational
background
and a strong math background. That is, you are a computational
mathematician.