Superficially, Wolfram Mathematica (and Alpha, etc) looks like a lot of things people tried in the ~70s that failed. Why did it work instead?
There was a market? Mathematica was better than the earlier systems? In 1975 academic departments had a tiny number of minicomputers, centrally controlled. By the late 1980s they had workstations, and individuals had software budgets. And M really was better.
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(Somewhere, I have an ancient copy of "Australian Personal Computer" which had a review of the first Mathematica. To say the review was positive is an extreme understatement. )
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Users had work stations, adequate budgets, and software sufficiently abstracted from the non-mathematical aspects of programming, allowing non-computing specialists to use the software; a larger market was enable (in part) due to lower transaction costs for the user.
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