Wolfram made a really useful tool. This is independent of how you may feel about NKS.
Try to take yourself back to 1988. Macs are newish. Desktop publishing is new. There's this neat new program called Mathematica. You can type in equations, solve them, and even graph them in 3D. You can laser-print the notebooks and they look better than textbooks.
Wolfram may be an egomaniacal self-promoter, but it's not all empty hype.
The details of the story are hard to find nowadays, probably because the lawyers told everyone to shut up about it. You can find some vague allusions to it here: " Wolfram quit Illinois, took the program private, and entered into complicated lawsuits with both his former employee and his co-authors (all since settled)." http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfra...
Btw, which side of his reputation does he live up to? To being a visionary genius or to being a raving crank?
Try to take yourself back to 1988. Macs are newish. Desktop publishing is new. There's this neat new program called Mathematica. You can type in equations, solve them, and even graph them in 3D. You can laser-print the notebooks and they look better than textbooks.
Wolfram may be an egomaniacal self-promoter, but it's not all empty hype.