Hello,
On Friday 31 October 2003 00:41, Richard Fateman wrote:
<...>
>The appearance of personal computers (the new Mac) and that
>Steve Job's workstation "NeXT" needed flashy software. Wolfram
>made his system flashy by making good use of Postscript display.
>Even though in reality it was poor (static, could not be rotated)
>it LOOKED GREAT in advertising.
>Wolfram's egocentricity was viewed as a sign of genius by
>scientifically unqualified people. They then concluded his
>program was a work of genius.
>Physicists, most of them quite ignorant of CAS, praised Mathematica
>as though it were the only CAS, not just another one.
I'm agree at this. I also thougth as Mathematica is the only CAS that time
(near the begining of nineties).
I can add another important reason for Mathematica( and Maple as well) won in
the game.The key point is the success of MS Windows. The popularity of this
platform on the big market including Asia and Russia was mainly due to
circulation of piraticy copies of this OS. The piraticy copies of other
products working on this platform, like MS Office, Mathematica, Maple ets,
become the only choice rapidly. Still, being here ( in Russia and China),
you are able to buy Mathematica 4.1, Maple 8 together with Mathcad and
something like MatLab 6 only for 5$!
My feeling is if we imagining for a moment that every piraticy copy on every
PC will stop to work suddenly then the scientific output from Russia and
China will fall on 100%!
Take care,
Valery