History and other context

  1. What is Maxima?

    • Maxima is a symbolic computation program.

  2. What is the origin of Maxima?

    • Maxima is a fork of DOE-Macsyma, itself a fork of the original Macsyma developed at MIT in the years 1968-1982. Commercial Macsyma forked from DOE Macsyma (the basis of Maxima) in 1982. It has many man-years of professional development in it in many areas, both mathematical and user-interface. On the other hand, there is no longer either a development or even a support staff any more. Without access to source code, users cannot modify the core functionality or fix bugs in it.

There is more about Maxima history on the project home page.