Maxima is a descendant of DOE Macsyma, which had its origins in the late 1960s 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 by William Schelter from 1982 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.