Re: mumath

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <1176609540.401496.320170@y80g2000hsf.googlegroups.com>,
John <zzzjoki@yahoo.com> wrote:

> On Apr 14, 4:05 pm, "Michael J. Mahon" <mjma...@aol.com> wrote:
>> aiiad...@gmail.com wrote:
>> > On Apr 14, 1:32 pm, aiiad...@gmail.com wrote:
>>
>>>>mumath...
>>
>>>>What is it?
>>
>>>>Rich
>>
>>> wikipedia is my friend:
>>
>>> muMATH is a Computer algebra system, which was developed in the late
>>> 70s and early eighties by Albert D. Rich and David Stoutemyer of the
>>> Soft Warehouse in Honolulu, Hawaii. It was implemented in the muSIMP
>>> programming language which was built on top of a LISP dialect called
>>> muLISP. Platforms supported were CP/M and TRS-DOS (since muMATH-79),
>>> Apple II (since muMATH-80) and MS-DOS (in muMATH-83, the last version).
>>
>> It's actually a quite capable algebra system, considering the
>> limitations of 64KB machines.
>>
>> -michael
>>
>> NadaNet networking for Apple II computers!
>> Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/
>>
>> "The wastebasket is our most important design
>> tool--and it's seriously underused."
> 
> Yep, and this was 27_ish year ago, before the HP28 or other more
> common CAS systems. It was unique.

It was rare, but not unique.  REDUCE and MACSYMA were two CAS'es which
predated muMATH, however they ran only on mainframes.

Perhaps muMATH was unique in its ability to run in only some 48K
of memory?  If so, it still may be unique - a modern CAS, yes
almost any modern software, will definitely require more memory than
that to run!

Besides computer algebra, muMATH could also to arbitrary precision
integer arithmetic.  There was an upper limit though of some 512 bytes
for each integer, which corresponds to soemwhat more than 1200 decimal
digits.  That was huge - on a microcomputer back in those times.

-- 
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