Macsyma: A personal history

The Macsyma system arose out of research on mathematical software in the AI group at MIT in the 1960s. Algorithm development in symbolic integration and simplification arose out of the interest of people, such as the author, who were also mathematics students. The later development of algorithms for the GCD of sparse polynomials, for example, arose out of the needs of our user community. During various times in the 1970s the computer on which Macsyma ran was one of the most popular nodes on the ARPANET. We discuss the attempts in the late 70s and the 80s to develop Macsyma systems that ran on popular computer architectures. Finally, we discuss the impact of the fundamental ideas in Macsyma on the author’s current research on large scale engineering and socio-technical systems.