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Ever since PTC<\/a> bought Mathcad<\/a> from its original developers, Mathsoft, back in 2006 the future for the product has been uncertain.\u00a0 The first PTC-led release of the software, Mathcad 14, followed a few months later to mixed reviews and it’s been very quiet ever since.\u00a0 The only sign of life over the last couple of years has been a few minor bug-fix releases which, to be perfectly frank,\u00a0 is rather insignificant compared to the competition.<\/p>\n All of this led me to write an article back in June 2009 called ‘Is Mathcad Dying?’<\/a> which garnered quite a lot of feedback from both the Mathcad user community and from PTC themselves.\u00a0 The reaction from the user community ranged from people calling me some colourful names through to those who agreed with much of what I said and everything in between.\u00a0 It quickly became apparent that there was a large user community who were fervently hoping that PTC would do something special with Mathcad rather than let it wither and die.\u00a0 These users feel that Mathcad brings something unique to the technical software landscape; something that isn’t provided by the likes of Mathematica<\/a>, MATLAB<\/a> and Maple<\/a> and they didn’t want it to go away.<\/p>\n In the meantime, some of the people at PTC got in touch with me to tell me that Mathcad is far from dying.\u00a0 I learned that not only was a new release of Mathcad on the cards (Mathcad 15) but that they were also working on what was essentially a complete reboot of the system called Mathcad Prime.\u00a0 They had also performed an internal company restructure which included the creation of a business unit specifically for Mathcad; this, I was told, would allow them to do much more with Mathcad than had been done before.\u00a0 It all sounded very exciting and I was looking forward to a host of public updates but then it all went very quiet again.<\/p>\n Until now!<\/p>\n