ANTIC Interview 137 - David Stoutemyer, The Soft Warehouse

Feb 27, 2016

David Stoutemyer, The Soft Warehouse

David Stoutemyer was co-founder of The Soft Warehouse, a company that specialized in mathematics software for several computer platforms. The company published three programs through Atari Program Exchange. Algicalc and Polycalc first appeared in the summer 1982 APX catalog for $22.95 each. Algicalc was described as a "valuable tool for students and teachers of algebra and calculus and for professionals who want a quick way to perform operations in symbolic algebra and calculus." It won third price in the education category in that catalog.

Polycalc was described as "a computational tool for performing symbolic algebra and calculus operations. It differs from ALGICALC in that POLYCALC supports polynomials that are generalized to permit fractional and negative powers of variables, and the program can use many unassigned variables, whereas ALGICALC can use only one. However, POLYCALC is essentially a polynomial system rather than a rational expression system."

Their third Atari program was Calculus Demon, which was first available in the fall 1982 catalog. It also cost $22.95, and was described as "a comprehensive tool for automatically deriving symbolic partial derivatives and indefinite integrals of expressions."

This interview took place on January 29, 2016.

Links:

Ways to implement computer algebra compactly by David Stoutemyer: http://www.sigsam.org/bulletin/articles/178/stoutemyer.pdf

International Derive User Group: http://www.austromath.at/dug/