History
The first concept of Maple arose from a meeting in November 1980 at the University of Waterloo. Researchers at the university wished to purchase a computer powerful enough to run Macsyma. Instead, it was decided that they would develop their own computer algebra system that would be able to run on lower cost computers. The first limited version appearing in December 1980 with Maple demonstrated first at conferences beginning in 1982. The name is a reference to Maple's Canadian heritage. By the end of 1983, over 50 universities had copies of Maple installed on their machines.
In 1984, the research group arranged with Watcom Products Inc to license and distribute Maple. In 1988 Waterloo Maple Inc. was founded. The company’s original goal was to manage the distribution of the software. Eventually, the company evolved to have an R&D department where most of Maple's development is done today with the rest done at university research labs worldwide including: the Symbolic Computation Laboratory at the University of Waterloo and the Ontario Research Centre for Computer Algebra at the University of Western Ontario.
In 1989, the first graphical user interface for Maple was developed and included with version 4.3 for the Macintosh. X11 and Windows versions of the new interface followed in 1990 with Maple V. In 1994 a special issue of a newsletter created by Maple developers called MapleTech' was published.
In 1999, with the release of Maple 6, Maple included some of the NAG Numerical Libraries. In 2003, the current "standard" interface was introduced with Maple 9. This interface is primarily written in Java (although portions, such as the rules for typesetting mathematical formulae, are written in the Maple language). The Java interface was criticized for being slow; improvements have been made in later versions, although the Maple 11 documentation recommends the previous (“classic”) interface for users with less than 500 MB of physical memory. This classic interface is no longer being maintained.
Between the mid 1995 and 2005 Maple lost significant market share to competitors due to a weaker user interface. In 2005, Maple 10 introduced a new “document mode”, as part of the standard interface. The main feature of this mode is that math is entered using two dimensional input. In 2008, Maple 12 added additional user interface features found in Mathematica, including special purpose style sheets, control of headers and footers, bracket matching, auto execution regions, command completion templates, syntax checking and auto-initialization regions. Additional features were added for making Maple easier to use as a MATLAB toolbox.
In September 2009 Maple and Maplesoft were acquired by the Japanese software retailer Cybernet Systems.
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