and European tour of the “Math Mobile, a roving demo center for the Wolfram language.”īut on a more serious note, Wolfram argued that, early on, the language saved its adopters from their darkest fear: “That they would always delegate the process of computation to somebody who would be down in the dungeon somewhere actually dealing with the computer. The original bootup screen for the Mathematica software.Īt one point, Wolfram even shared a photo of the 1997 U.S. That list doesn’t include “impossible” product names that didn’t make the cut, including “Mathesourus,” “Mathdroid” and … “Igor.” Wolfram jokingly calls the slide “what might have been.” Wolfram ended the video with a list of other names considered for the language - a print-out of a file created in a DOS text editor back in August 1987. Jobs had even encouraged Wolfram’s group to name the new language Mathematica. (Though that computer was still months away from its first public launch).
He recalled how a copy of the Mathematica book was signed by the great tech luminaries of 1988, including Andy Bechtolsheim (co-founder of Sun Microsystems), Digital Equipment Corporation’s Gordon Bell, and even 33-year-old Steve Jobs (then with NeXT).Īt the time, the Mathematica language itself was running on “Macintoshes, some workstations, a variety of other computers” - including a computer from Jobs’ post-Apple company, NeXT. “In a sense,” Wolfram wrote in a celebratory blog post, “our goal with computational language is now to do something like the invention of mathematical notation, but for the much broader and deeper domain of computation-and thereby to enable a dramatic streamline of our ability to think in computational terms.”Įarly in Wolfram’s video, he shared a slide showing an ancient 1988 headline from InfoWorld magazine about the launch of the Mathematica language - along with stories about the OS/2 operating system and trade-ins on IBM personal computers. But Wolfram also took the opportunity to look towards the future - as well as a deep dive into the history of computing, and even of mankind’s centuries-long quest for knowledge and understanding. The video chat was full of fun reminiscences about the early days of personal computing. Circa 1988 Mathematica users manuals in analog form, with software on floppy disks.
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