Edit detail for HistoricAxiom revision 4 of 4

History

FriCAS has it origin in long developement in IBM laboratories. First, it was called Scratchpad. Inn 1976 project changed to new design and was named Scratchpad II. Scratchpad II was developed under direction of Richard Jenks. Barry Trager was key to the technical direction of the project. Scratchpad developed over many years and was basically considered as a research platform for developing new ideas in computational mathematics. Mathematical part of Scratchpad was written in strongly typed language called Spad. Sligtly more permissive variant was used as main user language. Original Spad compiler was developed very early during Scratchpad II lifecycle. It was improved later, but there were several attempts to replace it by newer code. Most successful candidate was Aldor

In the 1990s, as IBM's fortunes slid, the Scratchpad project was renamed to Axiom, sold to the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) in England and became a commercial system. As part of the Scratchpad project at IBM in Yorktown Tim Daly worked on all aspects of the system and eventually helped transfer the product to NAG. For a variety of reasons it never became a financial success and NAG withdrew it from the market in October, 2001.

Open Source

NAG agreed to release Axiom as free software, under this license.

The basic motivation was that Axiom represents something different from other programs in a lot of ways. Primarily because of its foundation in mathematics the Axiom system will potentially be useful 30 years from now. In its current state it represents about 30 years and 300 man-years of research work. To strive to keep such a large collection of knowledge alive seems a worthwhile goal.

Unfortunatly, free Axiom was released without Aldor. Aldor was released under open source licence in 2013, but at that time there was substantial developement in old Spad compiler. ATM is not clear which developement line is more promising: Aldor or old Spad compiler.

Early open source developent was led by Tim Daly. Tim wanted developers to use Knuth-style [Literate Programming]?

Below is official list of goals in 2002-2007 period:

• develop a better user interface
• make it useful as a teaching tool
• develop an algebra server protocol
• integrate additional mathematics
• rebuild the algebra in a [Literate Programming]? style
• integrate logic programming
• develop an Axiom Journal with refereed submissions.

Axiom Forks

In 2007 open sorce Axiom project forked twice, leading to three independent projects, see ForksInfo

List of Axiom Contributors

The following is a fairly complete list of people who have contributed to the development of Axiom over it's long history up to 2007.

Many of these people are still actively involved with Axiom. Some however have already passed beyond these mortal concerns and we can only silently thank them for this wonderful legacy!

(1) -> )credits