Mathsoft

» see mathsoft.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Allen Razdow and David Blohm founded Mathsoft in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1984. Two years later Razdow and Josh Bernoff shipped Mathcad for MS-DOS, and the thing it did that nothing else did was show the calculation the way an engineer would write it on paper. An integral sign looked like an integral sign. A fraction had a bar across the middle. You edited the expression in place and the numbers below it recalculated.

This sounds small now because a generation of tools copied it. In 1986 it was the difference between a document and a program. TK Solver existed, Eureka arrived in 1987, and both of them wanted equations typed as text in their own syntax. Mathcad was a notebook where the math and the prose describing the math sat on the same page, which meant the calculation was also the report, and the report was checkable by someone who had never opened the software.

It also tracked units. Give it a length in millimeters and a force in newtons and it would carry the dimensions through the whole sheet and refuse to add a pressure to a temperature. Every engineer who has ever destroyed a spreadsheet by mixing metric and imperial in one column understands exactly how much that is worth, and almost no other tool did it.

The software an engineering student learns is whichever one their department bought a site license for, and mine was not this one. Turkish engineering faculties ran on MATLAB, the way most of them everywhere did, so Mathcad reached me as a name in other people's reference lists and a file extension I could not open. Mechanical and civil people had it. Computer engineers wrote a loop instead and never learned what they were missing on units.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the funny part ~

Mathsoft ended up running two unrelated businesses. Statistical Sciences of Seattle merged in during 1993 and brought S-PLUS, the commercial implementation of the S language, so the company was now selling a numerical notebook to structural engineers and a statistics platform to pharmaceutical researchers out of the same building. Then it added StudyWorks, homework software for middle and high school students.

In 2001 the seams gave way. The corporation kept the statistics business, moved to Seattle and renamed itself Insightful, while the Mathcad line was spun out to its management as a private company called Mathsoft Engineering and Education. Both halves were later bought by somebody else. Insightful went to TIBCO in 2008, by which point S-PLUS had lost its market to R, which was free and did the same job.

~ the long tail ~

PTC agreed to buy Mathsoft Engineering and Education in April 2006 for $63.25 million in cash, against roughly $20 million of annual revenue and 130 employees, and closed it that spring. PTC wanted the calculation layer next to its CAD products, which is a reasonable place for it, and the Mathsoft name went away.

Mathcad kept going under the new owner through version 15 in June 2010, then restarted as Mathcad Prime in January 2011 with a new file format and a long argument from users about what the rewrite had lost. It is still sold. The company is not, and neither is the peculiar idea that made it: that a piece of engineering work should be a readable document first and a computation second. Most technical calculation now happens in a notebook full of Python where the math is code again, which is where Mathcad found it in 1986.

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