Wolfram Research came out with a $250 Home edition of Mathematica. Regular licenses of Mathematic were expensive and out of reach for individual users, except in the academic market.
I used to own three different academic licenses of Mathematica in the past (1.0, 2.0, and 4.0) for the PC and Mac. I tried installing the last copy of Mathematica that I had and was unable to activate it, and the Mathematica support would not issue a new license because I was not a current student. I thought about paying for a course in the local community college just to get a student id, so that I can purchase an academic license of Mathematica, all for less than the price at retail.
This version is 7.0, and it follows quickly from version 6.0, which only seemed to have been released less than two years earlier. Apprehensively, some of the recent advances seem to touch on work that I have been doing, equational theorem proving in 6.0, sat-solving and discrete calculus in 7.0. Most recently, Wolfram Research have been working on a project called Wolfram|Alpha, a computational knowledge engine. I have always felt that it was a matter of time before the evaluation engine would be applied to natural language.
