Franz and Macsyma
Tuesday, November 1, 2005
The other day, I commented about my experiences with Maxima and provided a little bit of Maxima's history - including the fact that Maxima had been based on Macsyma. At the time, I hadn't realized that the early history of Franz had been also intimately tied to Macsyma; however, I got an email from Kevin Layer that pointed out those early ties. I did a bit of googling and found a good history of Macsyma/Maxima in the Maxima Book. In addition, Franz's own company history page provides some interesting background material:
"The roots of Franz Inc. began in the early seventies with a mathematical program at MIT named Macsyma. Macsyma, a symbolic manipulator used to solve complex math problems, was originally written in a version of the Lisp Programming Language called MACLisp. Macsyma was such a large program, however, that it could only run effectively on a specially-configured DEC 10 computer which had been loaded up with a huge, expensive memory (huge in those days meant about 2.5 megabytes!).And, from these beginnings, was born Franz!
Professor Richard Fateman, one of Macsyma's original programmers, came to UC Berkeley in 1974 and continued to access the MIT system over the ARPAnet (the predecessor of today's Internet). In 1978, he learned of a new DEC computer, called the VAX-11/780, which could run Macsyma and many other programs more efficiently and at a much lower cost. The VAX could do so because it included a large and inexpensive Virtual Address Extension - a critical feature that gave a programmer the ability to run programs larger than the actual memory space of the computer.
Fateman, along with several other faculty members, received funding from the National Science Foundation to acquire the first of many VAX computers at Berkeley (which they christened Ernie CoVAX). This group went on to make significant modifications to the VAX to make it more useful. They developed a new operating system - VAX UNIX (based on the UNIX operating system) which offered a far more robust virtual memory. Through their research efforts, they created a portable operating system and environment that freed researchers from the proprietary operating systems of vendors. This enabled programmers to buy and use whatever hardware was fastest or least expensive.
Fateman also recruited students (including John Foderaro, Kevin Layer and Keith Sklower - future Franz Inc. founders) to build a version of Lisp that would form the substrate for the version of VAX Macsyma. The Lisp was named 'Franz Lisp' after Franz Liszt (1811-1886), not only to fit in with the Berkeley-pun-filled environment, but also to emphasize that this was a quick implementation. As it turned out, Franz Lisp dominated subsequent VAX Lisps that appeared later."
