History
Launch preparations began on May 15, 2009 at 7 pm CDT and were broadcast live on Justin.tv. The plan was to publicly launch the service a few hours later, with expected issues due to extreme load. The service was officially launched on May 18, 2009.
Wolfram Alpha has received mixed reviews. Wolfram Alpha advocates point to its potential, some even stating that how it determines results is more important than current usefulness.
On December 3, 2009, an iPhone app was introduced. Some users considered the initial $50 price of the iOS app unnecessarily high, since the same features could be freely accessed by using a web browser instead. They also complained about the simultaneous removal of the mobile formatting option for the site. Wolfram responded by lowering the price to $2, offering a refund to existing customers and re-instating the mobile site.
On October 6, 2010 an Android version of the app was released and it is now available for Kindle Fire and Nook. A further 71 apps are available which use the Wolfram Alpha engine for specialized tasks.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)