Derive

~ the obit ~

Derive was a computer algebra system: you gave it an expression and it gave you back an exact answer, factored or solved, instead of a decimal approximation. It arrived in 1988 for MS-DOS, written in muLISP, which Soft Warehouse had also written. The company was Albert Rich and David Stoutemyer, working out of Honolulu, and its first product was muMATH, the system Derive replaced.

The thing people remembered about it was the size. Derive needed so little memory that it ran happily on hardware that had been obsolete for years, which made it the symbolic algebra program a school could actually deploy. Mathematica was for a workstation. Derive was for the computer already sitting in the classroom, and a version of the same engine later fit inside a handheld calculator.

Texas Instruments merged Soft Warehouse into itself effective 30 September 1999. Rich stayed on as an independent contractor from November 1999 to October 2005 and wrote the mathematical engine for Derive 6.10, which shipped in October 2004 and turned out to be the last one. On 29 June 2007 TI discontinued the product in favor of the TI-Nspire CAS, the calculator line that had inherited the job.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the user group ~

The DERIVE User Group was founded in 1991 and grew past 500 members across the world. It ran local meetings and published the DERIVE Newsletter four times a year, never shorter than 46 pages, full of other teachers' worked examples and classroom arguments about method. Josef Böhm founded it and edited the newsletter, and he kept doing both long after Texas Instruments had stopped selling the software.

That is the detail worth keeping about Derive. The product was discontinued in 2007 and the user group simply carried on, because what it had actually built was a correspondence network among mathematics teachers who happened to share a tool. Böhm died in 2024, still editing the newsletter.

~ the exam problem ~

This never had a Turkish moment, and the reason is structural rather than cultural. Derive's classroom base was European, strongest in the German-speaking countries where the user group was run from, and it spread the way school software spreads: through teachers who bought licenses for a lab. In Turkey the mathematics that matters is the university entrance exam, which does not allow a calculator into the room at all, let alone a symbolic one.

By the time I needed anything of this kind, at engineering school in the mid 2000s, the answer was whatever was installed on the lab machines, and that was MATLAB. Derive was already seven years inside Texas Instruments by then and two years from being switched off.

~ after ~

Albert Rich left Derive behind with the company and spent the rest of his life on Rubi, a public domain rule-based integrator he published through a website he ran himself. He was born on 26 April 1949 and died on 11 August 2023. Soft Warehouse's other legacy is easier to find: open a TI-89 or a TI-92 and the symbolic engine answering you grew out of the same code that ran on a DOS box in 1988.

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