Schoonschip was one of the first computer algebra systems, developed in 1963 by

Martinus J. G. Veltman Martinus Justinus Godefriedus "Tini" Veltman (; 27 June 1931 – 4 January 2021) was a Dutch theoretical physicist. He shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in physics with his former PhD student Gerardus 't Hooft for their work on particle theory. Biogr ...

, for use in particle physics. "Schoonschip" refers to the Dutch expression "schoon schip maken": to make a clean sweep, to clean/clear things up (literally: to make the ship clean). The name was chosen "among others to annoy everybody, who could not speak Dutch". Veltman initially developed the program to compute the quadrupole moment of the W boson, the computation of which involved "a monstrous expression involving in the order of 50,000 terms in intermediate stages" Nobel Lecture by Martinus J.G. Veltman held on December 8, 1999
"From Weak Interactions to Gravitation", p. 4 of th
paper
/ref> The initial version, dating to December 1963, ran on an

IBM 7094 The IBM 7090 is a second-generation transistorized version of the earlier IBM 709 vacuum tube mainframe computer that was designed for "large-scale scientific and technological applications". The 7090 is the fourth member of the IBM 700/7000 ser ...

mainframe. In 1966 it was ported to the CDC 6600 mainframe, and later to most of the rest of Control Data's CDC line. In 1983 it was ported to the

Motorola 68000 The Motorola 68000 (sometimes shortened to Motorola 68k or m68k and usually pronounced "sixty-eight-thousand") is a 16/32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessor, introduced in 1979 by Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector ...

microprocessor, allowing its use on a number of 68000-based systems running variants of Unix. FORM can be regarded, in a sense, as the successor to Schoonschip.

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