Maxima is a descendant of DOE Macsyma, which had it's origins in the late sixties at MIT. It is the oldest such system still in use today, and led the way for programs such as Maple and Mathematica. This particular variant of Macsyma was maintained since 1982 by William Schelter, until he passed away in 2001. Since that time a group of users and developers has formed to keep Maxima alive and kicking. It is reasonably feature complete, with abilities such as symbolic integration, 3D plotting, and an ODE solver. It currently lacks the graphical markup capabilities of it's commercial competition, although there are various interfaces which can be used to partially address that concern. (See Related Programs).