>
> 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$!
In fact,in china people can get Mathematica or Maple or Mathcad or Matlab
only for 4 yuan,that is about 0.5$.
> 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%!
Maybe not so bad. Many professors and students in my university still
use fortran rather than Matlab. I found newly pubished book about scilab
placed near many the Matlab books in a bookstore in my university. There
are more and more young students choose latex typing papers rather than MS
Word.
The weakness for this free or share soft is that there are little documents
for them in chinese.
Yin Zhangqi
>
> Take care,
> Valery
>
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