terrific video. i well remember the 'old days' when Mathematiica was being created at stephen's Center for Complex Systems Research (CCSR) on the U of I campus. i would stop by there almost daily at around 3am (my own working hours are a bit strange) and invariably find a group of people working on making Mathematica. stephen would sometimes emerge from his office, usually holding a Dove ice cream bar. it was great to have people to talk to; they were much more interesting, and had more interesting things to say, then my professorial colleagues. an exciting time and probably the most fun i ever had on campus or in C-U. I also enjoyed watching the ducks in the pond just outside the CCSR building.

While I was an undergraduate student at Virginia Tech in the early 80's, I first had a little exposure to Macsyma (MAC’s 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.

I got Mathematica right about the time that this video was produced. I had just gotten a Mac SE/30, which was one of the first computers to have a built-in hardware Floating Point Unit. I was able to get and use the faster version of Mathematica, version 1.1, which made use of the FPU.

Mathematica was the 'killer app' that justified having a computer. All through the 1990s, I would max out the RAM and storage for all the computers I had, even though in many cases it would double the cost of the computer. (Fortunately, you don't have to do this anymore.)

I really liked Donald Brown's quote. I suspect that there is a typo -- wander instead of wonder --- although both words convey the magic that happens when you can explore. I certainly would not have made the same discoveries I did if I had to program in c or use paper and pencil.

Even though today's hardware and Mathematica are orders of magnitude better than what is in the video, I think we are still just starting out on the journey.