A review of Macsyma

We review the successes and failures of the Macsyma algebraic manipulation system from the point of view of one of the original contributors. We provide a retrospective examination of some of the controversial ideas that worked, and some that did not. We consider input/output, language semantics, data types, pattern matching, knowledge-adjunction, mathematical semantics, the user community, and software engineering. We also comment on the porting of this system to a variety of computing systems, and possible future directions for algebraic manipulation system-building