There are now over 1.4 million Mathcad users worldwide and a significant proportion are in what we might call 'multi-user installations'. Many 'household name' manufacturing and research organisations have made Mathcad the core of a collaborative environ- ment where engineers can develop, document, share and archive their work. Mathcad has always been best described as an electronic 'back of an envelope', where mathematical calculations entered in a free-form manner become 'live'.
Complex equations are automatically solved - it's to maths what the calculator is to arithmetic.
Calculations need to be validated, many people often have to go over old ground for problem-solving and subsequent development, and if every original calculation, even simple arithmetical ones, could possibly have been recorded it would save a lot of time. Mathcad comes in at a much more funda- mental level, recording all of what you call the 'back of an envelope' mathematical calculations which invariably need to be studied later. Very much so. In fact, there are large multinational corporations moving strongly in that direction thanks to Mathcad. But the key is to meet this aim without stifling creativity, and by enabling users to work in conventional ways, Mathcad does just this.