Dear Cliff,
Dear Martin,
Dear Colleagues,
I completely agree with Cliff's comments below.
I can just add that the name of the company that actually had
sold the commercial Macsyma (at least once) after Macsyma Inc.
had been sold to Mr. Andrew Topping (which seems to be the
company of Mr. Topping) is not Symbolics Technology, Inc.
as far as I remember. This is just an indication (not a proof
of course) that these two companies are different.
The most probable fact is that the owner of Symbolics, Inc.
sold the rights of its technology division and old Lisp machines
in general to Symbolics Technology, Inc., but he kept the
rights of commercial Macsyma for the new company, Macsyma,
Inc. continuing to improve (a very serious improvement now, not
just bug fixes) and sell Macsyma, but not devoted Lisp computers
any more. This seems to be the most reasonable explanation
of the situation.
Of course, Symbolics Technology, Inc. could have obtained
or being negotiating to obtain the right to sell the commercial
Macsyma as well with Mr. Topping or some other company
having (in the past and still having) the right to sell Macsyma
(and there have been few such companies beyond Macsyma,
Inc. through M.I.T. licences). These situations are possible, but
only the commercial Macsyma of Macsyma Inc. has serious
advantages over DOE-Macsyma and its present successor
Maxima too.
If you ask Mr. Richard Petti (through a private message I mean)
you will probably get a complete reply about the whole situation.
Best regards,
Nikos
> "C Y" <smustudent1@yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- "Nikolaos I. Ioakimidis" <ioakimidis@otenet.gr> wrote:
>
> > My impression is that now Macsyma can be sold and
> > (theoretically) is really sold mainly by DOE (DOE-Macsyma)
> > and by the known company to where Macsyma Inc. had
> > been sold too. (Again I do not remember the name this moment.)
>
> We're talking about the Macsyma Inc codebase, which Andrew Topping? (I
> believe) bought.
>
> > The company mentioned below, Symbolics Technology, Inc.
> > seems to have no rights to sell Maxima, but only LISP-
> > machines and related software, not including Macsyma ,
> > since Symbolics, Inc.seems to have transferred this
> > particular right (the right to sell Macsyma) to Macsyma,
> > Inc. and not to Symbolics Technology, Inc.
>
> The discussed possibility is the owner of both Symbolics and commercial
> Macsyma is the same individual, and as a consequence Symbolics is again
> set up to sell commercial Macsyma. No indication of that so far
> though.
>
> > This seems to be the reason that no advertisement is present.
> >
> > Naturally, this is my personal opinion, but with respect to
> > D.O.E., I am almost sure, there is still an announcement
> > about the availability of Maxima.
>
> Maxima and commercial Macsyma are two different things - it is the
> renewed availability of commercial Macsyma which is perking interest
> -for some people the added bug fixes present in the commercial version
> are worth the $$$. However, thus far I haven't seen any direct
> evidence that Symbolics has Macsyma to offer, and my email asking about
> it was never answered.
>
> CY