--- C Y <smustudent1@yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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.
OK, for the record this has now changed. I contacted David K. Schmidt
of Symbolics, and it's now official - they are selling the Windows
version of Macsyma, sorta. Here's what I know from his email:
"The owner of Symbolics bought Macsyma back 1999. In the course of the
next year he lost all of the employees, had to put the assets
(including the servers with the source code) into storage and cease
operations. He tasked to me to continue selling Macsyma through
Symbolics to anyone that wanted. When the Macsyma servers went down,
their website went off the net and subsequently, someone else picked up
the domain name."
That explains what happened to the macsyma.com address.
"We sell a Macsyma CD with keys to the Windows version of Macsyma and
PDEase for $500. There is no hard copy documentation and no support
available. I do not have the Linux version and do not have the ability
to generate a key for the Unix version."
So there we have it. Apparently there isn't enough funding to restart
active development right now. I just hope those hard disks don't go
bad in storage. Does sound like the hope is to do something with it
someday, so I suspect buying the rights to the code might be a tad
expensive :-(. I didn't ask though.
There currently isn't any info about Macsyma on the Symbolics website.
Here's the guy to contact: (Note - he also is the Lisp Machine guy, if
anyone is still into Lisp machines.)
DAVID K. SCHMIDT
Dir. of Sales & Maintenance Operations
Symbolics
P.O. Box 10862, Burke, VA 22009
703-455-0430 (voice)
703-440-0388 (fax)
dkschmidt@compuserve.com
Personally, the no support thing kinda ma
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