Mar 162010
An interesting anniversary today: 25 years ago, on March 15, 1985, the first ever .com domain name was registered, symbolics.com. The company, in addition to building their own brand of “Lisp Machine” computers, also happened to be selling the commercial version of the MACSYMA computer algebra software. The same software that, in the form of its open-source version, Maxima, continues to evolve thanks to a devoted team of developers… of which I happen to be one.
Alas, Symbolics is no longer, at least not the original company. A privately held company by the same name which obtained much of Symbolics’ assets still sells licenses of the old MACSYMA code.