A 3-ring conference binder, from back when we collected paper copies!

Version 2.1 on Win 3.1. Things just keep on getting better!

A long time ago, out of the blue, my father purchased me a copy of Mathematica 2.2 for students during a Mac World Expo in Boston. I never asked for it, he just purchased it for me and I had not idea of what to do with it. At the time I preferred to use different product called Theorist from Prescience Corporation which was much easier to use, but not programmable. It took a long time to grow on me but eventually I realized that Mathematica was better because of its flexibility and power.

I would be interested in knowing how people initially learned Mathematica. It has changed quite a bit over the various versions. When I started with Mathematica, it came on 4 floppies (as I recall), and the documentation was the book and an additional book or two about specifics for your platform and some of the packages. You could read the book in a day or so, although understanding it took some playing around with the app. There was no documentation center. Those of us on Macs could use Nancy Blachman's Hypercard stack (assuming you had enough RAM to run both simultaneously). I was fortunate in that my SE/30 (and later IIfx) had a whopping 20 Megabytes of RAM. There were services like Compuserve, but no World Wide Web.

As later versions came out, I would read the new Mathematica Book first and see what was new and changed -- the books got longer as the version numbers increased, until version 6 (?) had no printed book.

The point is that my initial experience of Mathematica is quite different from someone who started with version 6 or later. I would like to know how these people learned Mathematica.

Of course, programming itself got more complicated in pretty much the same way. I learned c and Macintosh programming at pretty much the same time, and for c, K&R was ok for a while, you needed more eventually. Inside Macintosh went from 3 volumes to 6 to 40 to electronic only over the same time span. I have no experience with Windows or Linux coding, but I imagine it was similar.

It would also be interesting to hear how those of us who are long time users handled the evolution of Mathematica. I still miss a reference book in the same way that I miss a real unabridged dictionary vs the on-line dictionaries: I can still find the definition of any work I can enter, but one cannot 'read' an on-line dictionary the way you can a physical one -- I finally purchased an OED second edition (one volume version with magnifier) just to have some of that experience.

I find that I have missed newer and better ways of doing stuff that I had learned how to do with earlier versions.

On the other hand, having 'live' documentation is really very useful, and am glad to have it.

SO.....

any stories about learning to use Mathematica??

My personal bet is that the first version I used was 2.2, on university AlphaStations back in 1995. Apparently the first version I wasn't using under university licensing scheme was 4.1.1. I have to conclude that I'm a latecomer, right? (Frankly I think the reason to get a license back then was that licensing structure had become more friendly to nonprofessional individuals, but I can't quite tell 20+ years since the event!)

My first experience with Mathematica was with whatever version was included in my purchase of a neXt computer in late 1990. I no longer have it or any documentation included. It might be 1.n or 2. Does anybody know what vsn. that would have been?

Thanks. The timing suggests that it was either 1.2 or 2.0.

First version used was on an Apple (??) in college for a physics class ~1988. That professor went on to write a few Physics Lab books using Mathematica. Could not afford Apple machines let alone NeXT; so for home use I later purchased Mathematica 1.2 for 386 MS-DOS (1989?). Shorly after that I got a math co-processor and updated to 386/387 version of Mathematica. I could not find those boxes but it came with Stephen Wolfram's Mathematica Book "A System for..." and a few other manuals. I have upgraded and kept my license current since.

Wow, you are way ahead of me, I think my first version was 7 - used it ever since (on Windows). I was exposed to Maple in the early 80's but as a student couldn't afford to buy it (or the required computing power). Fascinated by it in 1987 I started to develop my own "algebraic manipulator" on my IBM XT clone (8088 processor) with Turbo Prolog (Borland) which was quite effient given memory constraints. I got it to a point where I could do some basic functions similar to Mathematica's Collect[] , Expand[], D[], Integrate[] and Plot[]. It was command line based. I remember Prolog was perfect for constructing the parser, and the list like data structures made it very suitable for the application at the time. Proud of my progress I presented it to my research group at the Acoustics and Vibration lab (ME) at MIT, but received a lot of not exactly encouraging blank stares. It not being the focus of my research, I gave up on it. I feel that the experience of my own effort lets me better appreciate the accomplishment of what Mathematica is today.

version 2.2

My first version of Mathematica: version 1.1 for the Macintosh II. This version does not show up on Wolfram's history, but I've got the box. It was specifically for the Macintosh II because it was the only Mac at the time that had the dedicated numeric co-processor.

I've had every version since, all for macOS. Currently working with 12.3 beta for the Apple Silicon chip.

Look what I found most on Linux box:

daniel@home:/usr/local/bin$ ls -l Mathematica*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 53 mai 13 15:24 Mathematica -> /opt/Wolfram/Mathematica/12.3/Executables/Mathematica
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 53 jan 12 23:19 Mathematica12.2 -> /opt/Wolfram/Mathematica/12.2/Executables/Mathematica
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 53 jun 26  2020 Mathematica.old -> /opt/Wolfram/Mathematica/12.1/Executables/Mathematica