"Initially, Maple was implemented in B on a Honeywell computer, but soon afterward, C became the obvious widely available language. In 1981, we moved from the Honeywell to a Vax 780. We purchased our first UNIX box for Maple in 1983 for $25,000, a Spectrix computer with one megabyte of memory.
... By the first week in December 1980, we had an operational Maple system, and it evolved from there. In trying to name the system, we started thinking of an acronym. When I suggested the name "Maple," we decided we would go with that, as it seemed like a good Canadian name (not an acronym).