MuPAD

» see mupad.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

MuPAD started in 1989 at the University of Paderborn as a research project with an unusual premise for a computer algebra system: it was designed to spread its work across multiple processors. That is what the name says. Multi Processing Algebra Data Tool, shortened to something pronounceable. Version 1.0 arrived in August 1992, and the manuals came out through Birkhäuser in German before anything else, which tells you who the first users were.

What it actually did was the usual hard part of symbolic mathematics. Integrals solved as expressions rather than numbers, equations rearranged, series expanded, matrices handled with symbols in them. Maple and Mathematica already owned that market and Macsyma had invented it twenty years earlier, so MuPAD arrived as the German academic entry with a domain-specific language of its own and an open interface that let other programs drive it.

In 1997 the work moved out of the university into SciFace Software GmbH, founded to sell it, still working with the research group. That is the point where most academic software either finds customers or quietly stops, and MuPAD found enough to keep going for eleven more years. Its wedge was price, since the Light edition cost nothing for non-profit educational and scientific use, which put it on department machines where the commercial license money had already been spent elsewhere.

Then MathWorks bought SciFace in September 2008. On 28 September 2008 MuPAD stopped being a product you could buy, and the code turned up inside the Symbolic Math Toolbox for MATLAB, where it has been doing the same mathematics ever since under somebody else's label. The MuPAD notebook interface survived inside MATLAB until R2020a, which removed it. The language is still there in the engine.

~ the record ~

~ the parallel idea ~

The reason for the name stopped mattering before the product did. Parallel evaluation of algebraic expressions was a live research question in 1989, when the machines that could do it were rare and expensive, and by the mid-1990s the interesting problem had moved to making one fast processor cheap. MuPAD kept the acronym and became a conventional single-machine system that happened to be named after an architecture nobody asked it for.

~ the free years ~

MuPAD Light, free to schools and research institutes until autumn 2005, is the version most people who met MuPAD actually met. It was also the thing that made it visible outside German-speaking universities, because a free symbolic algebra system with real capability was worth downloading in a decade when the alternatives came with per-seat pricing.

I was an engineering student in Turkey in those years, and the software my faculty paid for was MATLAB. Nobody around me typed the word MuPAD. The joke, which took me until researching this grave to notice, is that the symbolic engine my department would eventually be running was this one anyway, bought and absorbed while I was still a student and renamed before it reached me.

~ what the redirect counts ~

Type mupad.de today and you land on the MathWorks page for the Symbolic Math Toolbox. The redirect carries a parameter on the end, s_tid=vanityurl_mupad.de, which exists so that somebody at MathWorks can count how many people still arrive by typing the dead product's address. Eighteen years after the sale, the number is apparently still worth tracking.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »