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:
“In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Perhaps universal history is the history of the diverse intonation of some metaphors.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)