[Chicago] Advice about a Java program?

[Toby, Brian H.]

but Wolfram himself is a pretty despicable guy. He allegedly screwed over a few of his cofounders early on in his company's career and took their credit and intellectual property.

FWIW, Mathematica was his second effort. My recollection (from many years back and perhaps not 100% accurate) is that he wrote the first program, called SMP (for symbolic math processing, or something like that) for his research. It ran only on a VAX. When he wanted to copyright it and market it, Caltech, where he was a postdoc, claimed ownership under the patent agreement that we students and employees signed (which did not cover copyrights) and sued. Caltech had way more money to spend on lawyers and won and then marketed SMP. FWIW, it was the largest program I had ever seen at that time and was the only program I even encountered that could actually crash a VAX.  Steve started again from scratch and created Mathematica. SMP did not ever get ported to any other platform.

I can’t speak to any of the above, but I believe he was screwed over by Caltech.

Brian

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