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.

Wow @George Woodrow III, that is interesting. Would be very nice if you post here a photo of the box of Mathematica V1.1, but I understand if you don't have the time.

Thank you George. Looks elegant, and the box is in great condition.

My first version of Mathematica was an alpha test on a 1/4 inch tape to run on a Sun Workstation in my office at NCSA in Illinois in the 80s. Given to me by Stephen to test long before it was called Mathematica. I may have been the first user outside of his actual developers, not sure. I used it mainly on SunOS, but later I had it on a NeXT machine, also in alpha test, I got from Jobs if memory serves. I had to hide the NeXT machine at home as no one was supposed to see it yet. I think I may have the tape somewhere in storage.

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.

@Mark, perhaps this page can help you - Mathematica Quick Revision History:

https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/quick-revision-history.html

Nice post! My first Mathematica version was also 4.0. I remember a physics professor that told us: you have to learn this! And then he started teaching us how to use it in his free time, of course with the intention we would become more productive in his classes of classical mechanics. Anyway I think the version I used more for university homework was 5.2.

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??

I remember Theorist. I had a copy of it. It was an elegant program, and being a dedicated Mac Program, more polished rendering of 3-D graphics. According to the LiveMath website, the program was sold to Waterloo Maple. Ironic, in that Maple abandoned the Macintosh during the dark days.

I also remember going to MacWorld in Boston. Nice place to get swag.

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

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

I forgot to mention that there was also Macsyma (Lisp based) which at the time (1980's) was the dominant software in the space. Macsyma apparently had several problems, no implementation on various popular platforms, licensing, cost and ability in solving numerical problems and quickly was overtaken by Mathematica.