of a mexican colleague that I saw for the first time Maple V Release 2 in mid '93.  Only some months later I have tried the Windows version. Here we had only PCs then.

In fact, in '89 I have missed the opportunity to try Maple. I have attended the First Brazilian School on Computer Algebra in Rio de Janeiro. It run parallel courses on Reduce and Maple. At that time the usual CAS within the community of relativists was Reduce, and I was using it since '87. And I have never heard before of Maple, so I choosed the course on Reduce...

No, the other images do not show this error message in their alternate field.

On the other hand, with Opera 9.25, two successive "Open image" operations are needed to view the actual image.

Right clicking > View  Image,  to see the actual image and right clicking on it to see "Properties" I see in the field Alternate Text:

The image “http://img.blog.163.com/photo/7qo1Z9eEsTnjWoL3hWRPKQ==/2551289188905909709.jpg” 
cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Perhaps someone that knows chineese could read the error message?

Right clicking on these pictures and selecting properties, you can see that they are .jpg files stored at img.blog.163.com. Blocking images from this server removes these chineese pictures.

It is not a Firefox issue. I observe this chineese art also wit Opera and IE.

Begin with this:

http://www.mapleprimes.com/blog/will/newoptionremoveneweditor

but things sort of this can be done for viewing:

S:=proc(e)
 local F:
 F:=(a,b)->evalb(map(whattype,[a,b])=[function,`+`]);
 convert(e,list):
 sort(%,F):
 %[1]&*%[2];
 end proc:

 Int((-t+x)*f(t),t = 0 .. x);
 subsop(1=S(op(1,%)),%);
 map(sort,%,[x,t]);

Int(`&*`(f(t),x-t),t = 0 .. x)

The fact  is that  frequently  it is easier  to make  the final "touch" of the calculations with pen and paper.

but things sort of this can be done for viewing:

S:=proc(e)
 local F:
 F:=(a,b)->evalb(map(whattype,[a,b])=[function,`+`]);
 convert(e,list):
 sort(%,F):
 %[1]&*%[2];
 end proc:

 Int((-t+x)*f(t),t = 0 .. x);
 subsop(1=S(op(1,%)),%);
 map(sort,%,[x,t]);

Int(`&*`(f(t),x-t),t = 0 .. x)

The fact  is that  frequently  it is easier  to make  the final "touch" of the calculations with pen and paper.

I think that the disregard to the issues of efficiency in the machine-human
interaction was an important error.

I have been using Reduce, Derive and Mathematica 1.x during the late 80's and early 90's. They all had ascii output (2D but ascii). The main problem that I
had at that time was the difficulty in the interpretation of the results
whenever the output became "large".

One way was to print the output and transcribe it by hand. This could be a long,
painstaking and error prone process. With the advent of Mathematica and 386's, in 92-93 I used to output in TeX form, saved to a file, repeated edit/tex/dvi view until I got it display in multiple lines, and then printed (in a dot matrix printer). In ten minutes or so I could have the output nicely printed...

So, it was largely irrelevant for me whether the CAS took 0.2s or 2s to
evaluate the integral.

At that time I used what I could get and I did not know that typesetted output
was possible but developers did not cared about it.

I think that the first CAS that I have seen with 2D typesetted output was
Maple V Release 2 in mid '93. It was a kind of revolution!


 

I find curious that no mention is made in this interview to the 'assume'
facility. In the article "Simplification and the assume facility" by Robert M
Corless and Michael B. Monagan, MapleTech vol.1, num.1, p.24 (1994),
references 6 and 7 are two articles by Trudy Weibel and Gaston Gonnet dealing with the design of this facility, I think.

For me, the handling of properties is a very important issue. But clearly it
was not included  in the initial design of the system. Sounds to me that it
was made as a needed patch in the way that it was possible at that time. And
that now it could be implemented better, but it will not because of some of
these aging issues.



 

whether in Drupal 6 or later I will be able to have the older editor with the older buttons. For me, with the quirks it had, the previous situation was better than the current one.

Do you mean 6.0? Any hope of improvement?

collected while I was "ambassador" of Maplesoft in Argentina in the 90's clearly shows that only a minority of physicists, astronomers and engineers were users of CAS and of those, the large majority used Mathematica. If they have ever heard of Maple, their apriori perception most frequently was (aparently) of something of  second rate.  And the unavoidable first question was "how does it compare to Mathematica?".

The same pattern seemed to hold in neighboring countries with the exception of Brazil.

On the other hand, among mathematicians, the distribution was more even.

Most probably, this distribution reflects in each case the distribution of usage among their colleagues  in the  northern hemisphere, from where these copies came.

I find that today the "Recent Comments" block has descended again.

This bug is quite strange as some complex expressions convert fine while some simpler ones do not. There is not a quite clear pattern, though expressions with several levels (eg with an exponent or a fraction) are more likely to be disrupted.

There is also an issue with the fonts. This version of the converter is using smaller fonts than the previous one. I liked better the formulas as they looked with the previous larger fonts.

Look at this one:

www.mapleprimes.com/forum/ode-analyzer

I could look for you many more threads, previous to the update, where gif files for math were right and are wrong now.