Hi Stephen.
> I am slowly getting the impression that I need to be connected to the
internet to run maxima. Is this correct?
No.
I believe that there are a number of examples on one of the web sites which
reference computation servers over the web (eg to use Octave, a matrix
calculator/numerical program), but Maxima itself definitely doesn't need the
web.
There are two parts to the current Maxima distribution. The first is
XMaxima, a TCL frontend with nice plotting and limited web browsing, which
calls the second part - Maxima itself - to do the algebra.
Maxima is present as an executable called saved_maxima.exe, which you should
be able to run from a Windows command prompt, though you may need to change
to an appropriate directory to use it (offhand I can't remember which one as
I don't have the old distribution installed).
Cheers
Mike Thomas