While I was an undergraduate student at Virginia Tech in the early 80's, I first had a little exposure to Macsyma (MACs SYmbolic MAnipulator) which was developed at MIT. It sparked my interest in symbolic formula manipulation, but as a student I didn't have more purchasing power than to buy a manual of the software.
In the mid 80's as PhD student in mechanical engineering at MIT, I finally was able to acquire my own IBM XT clone (still not able to afford Apple computers). In 1987 I bumped into Borland's Turbo Prolog and decided to write my own version of an algebraic equation manipulator. I remember I spend quite some time on the equation and command parser and then added a couple of algebraic functions like "collect" and "simplify" etc. of course nowhere near the capabilities of Macsyma and no graphics. I remember, I proudly demoed my system at my weekly laboratory lunch discussion to my fellow mechanical engineering students and professors, but the reception was no more than lukewarm. So, busy with more pressing projects, I abandoned my pursuit of my own symbolic equation solver, drifting back to Fortran, C and later Matlab and Mathcad (which later included some version of Maple).
From time to time, my interest got re-awakened when I read interesting articles in the Mathematica Journal.
Then about 6 years ago, I was looking for something better to replace Mathcad. Mathcad was fine to do a quick graph or integration etc. but the user interface makes it very cumbersome to write actual programs. I discovered the inexpensive home edition of Mathematica and decided to try and learn. Needless to say, I can't let go..
So shortly after, I had my company acquire a professional license for work. I now do a lot of my research in Mathematica as well as fun stuff at home. From my experience, Mathematica proves Alfred North Whitehead right, and I agree, it's the V8 dropped into a Chevy, even today.
My daughter now studies physics (IPSP) at the University of Leipzig in Germany in her first year. She decided to take an introduction to programming in her second semester. When looking at the course description 12-PHY-BIPCS I was excited that they teach Mathematica. However, to my disappointment, I found out today that the instructor teaches Python instead. I'm not sure what the reason is, but I hope it is not the cost to the students and instructor that is the hurdle to teaching Mathematica anymore.