Symbolic Manipulation Program, usually called SMP, was a computer algebra system designed by Chris A. Cole and Stephen Wolfram at Caltech circa 1979 and initially developed in the Caltech physics department under Wolfram's leadership with contributions from Geoffrey C. Fox, Jeffrey M. Greif, Eric D. Mjolsness, Larry J. Romans, Timothy Shaw, and Anthony E. Terrano. It was first sold commercially in 1981 by the Computer Mathematics Corporation of Los Angeles which later became part of Inference Corporation; Inference Corp. further developed the program and marketed it commercially from 1983 to 1988. SMP was essentially Version Zero of the more ambitious Mathematica system. A computer algebra system (CAS) is a software program that facilitates symbolic mathematics. ... Stephen Wolfram (born August 29, 1959 in London) is a scientist known for his work in theoretical particle physics, cellular automata, complexity theory, and computer algebra, and is the creator of the computer program Mathematica. ... California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (commonly known as Caltech) is a private, coeducational university located in Pasadena, California, in the United States. ... Flag Seal Nickname: City of Angels Location Location within Los Angeles County in the state of California Coordinates , Government State County California Los Angeles County Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (D) Geographical characteristics Area     City 1,290. ... This article is about computer software. ...

SMP was influenced by the earlier computer algebra systems Macsyma (of which Wolfram was a user) and Schoonschip (whose code Wolfram studied [1]). MACSYMA Reference Manual, MIT, 1977 Macsyma is a computer algebra system that was originally developed from 1967 to 1982 at MIT as part of Project MAC and later marketed commercially. ...

Bibliography

• Chris A. Cole, Stephen Wolfram, "SMP: A Symbolic Manipulation Program", Proceedings of the fourth ACM symposium on Symbolic and algebraic computation (SIGSAM), Snowbird, Utah, 1981.
• Stephen Wolfram with Chris A. Cole, SMP: A Symbolic Manipulation Program, Reference Manual, California Institute of Technology, 1981; Inference Corporation, 1983. full text
• Stephen Wolfram, "Symbolic Mathematical Computation", Communications of the ACM, April 1985 (Volume 28, Issue 4). Despite the general-sounding title the focus is on an introduction to SMP.
• J.M. Greif, "The SMP Pattern-Matcher" in B.F. Caviness (editor), Proceedings of EUROCAL 1985, volume 2, pgs. 303-314, Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science, no. 204, ISBN 3-540-15984-3 A discussion, with examples, of the capabilities, tasks, and design philosophy of the pattern-matcher.