So much has happened with Mathematica in the quarter century since then. What began with Mathematica 1.0 has turned into the vast system that is Mathematica today. And as I look at the 25th Anniversary Scrapbook, it makes me proud to see how many contributions Mathematica has made to invention, discovery and education:īut to me what’s perhaps most satisfying is how the fundamental principles on which I built Mathematica have stood the test of time. And how the core ideas and language that were in Mathematica 1.0 persist today (and yes, most Mathematica 1.0 code will still run unchanged today).īut, OK, where did Mathematica come from? How did it come to be the way it is? It’s a long story, really. Deeply entwined with my own personal story. But particularly as I look to the future, I find it interesting to understand how things have evolved from all that history.

And there were pretty nice speeches about the promise of Mathematica from a spectrum of computer industry leaders, including Steve Jobs (then at NeXT), who was kind enough to come even though he hadn’t appeared in public for a while. And someone at the event had the foresight to get all the speakers to sign a copy of the book, which had just gone on sale that day at bookstores all over the country: People were pretty excited to see what Mathematica could do.

(Yes, that was the original startup screen, and yes, Mathematica 1.0 ran on Macs and various Unix workstation computers PCs weren’t yet powerful enough.) Late the night before we were still duplicating floppy disks and stuffing product boxes. But at noon on June 23 there I was at a conference center in Santa Clara starting up Mathematica in public for the first time: In a few weeks it’ll be 25 years ago: June 23, 1988-the day Mathematica was launched.

Mathematica for physics