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A History of MATLAB

CLEVE MOLER, MathWorks, USA

JACK LITTLE, MathWorks, USA

Shepherds: Jens Palsberg, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Guy L. Steele Jr., Oracle Labs, USA

The first MATLAB® (the name is short for “Matrix Laboratory”) was not a programming language. Written in Fortran in the late 1970s, it was a simple interactive matrix calculator built on top of about a dozen subroutines from the LINPACK and EISPACK matrix software libraries. There were only 71 reserved words and built-in functions. It could be extended only by modifying the Fortran source code and recompiling it.

The programming language appeared in 1984 when MATLAB became a commercial product. The calculator was reimplemented in C and significantly enhanced with the addition of user functions, toolboxes, and graphics. It was available initially on the IBM PC and clones; versions for Unix workstations and the Apple Macintosh soon followed.

In addition to the matrix functions from the calculator, the 1984 MATLAB included fast Fourier transforms (FFT). The Control System Toolbox™ appeared in 1985 and the Signal Processing Toolbox™ in 1987. Built-in support for the numerical solution of ordinary differential equations also appeared in 1987.

The first significant new data structure, the sparse matrix, was introduced in 1992. The Image Processing Toolbox™ and the Symbolic Math Toolbox™ were both introduced in 1993.

Several new data types and data structures, including single precision floating point, various integer and logical types, cell arrays, structures, and objects were introduced in the late 1990s.

Enhancements to the MATLAB computing environment have dominated development in recent years. Included are extensions to the desktop, major enhancements to the object and graphics systems, support for parallel computing and GPUs, and the “Live Editor”, which combines programs, descriptive text, output and graphics into a single interactive, formatted document.

Today there are over 60 Toolboxes, many programmed in the MATLAB language, providing extended capabilities in specialized technical fields.

CCS Concepts: • Software and its engineering → General programming languages; • Social and professional topics → History of programming languages.

Additional Key Words and Phrases: linear algebra, MATLAB, matrix computation

ACM Reference Format:

Cleve Moler and Jack Little. 2020. A History of MATLAB. Proc. ACM Program. Lang. 4, HOPL, Article 81 (June 2020), 67 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3386331

Authors’ addresses: Cleve Moler, MathWorks, Natick, MA, 01760, USA, moler@mathworks.com; Jack Little, MathWorks, Natick, MA, 01760, USA.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s).

© 2020 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). 2475-1421/2020/6-ART81 https://doi.org/10.1145/3386331

Proc. ACM Program. Lang., Vol. 4, No. HOPL, Article 81. Publication date: June 2020.

PROLOGUE

In his first job after grad school, in 1966, Cleve Moler was an Assistant Professor of Mathematics. He taught calculus, numerical analysis, and linear algebra. For linear algebra, he followed the traditional syllabus, which emphasized proofs of theorems about linear transforms in abstract vector spaces. There was no time devoted to computers or applications of matrices. He vowed never to follow the traditional syllabus again. He wanted to use matrix factorizations, like the singular value decomposition, and emphasize applications, like principal component analysis. And he wanted his students to use computers and modern software. He wanted a new course, matrix analysis, to replace traditional linear algebra.

Proc. ACM Program. Lang., Vol. 4, No. HOPL, Article 81. Publication date: June 2020.

Proc. ACM Program. Lang., Vol. 4, No. HOPL, Article 81. Publication date: June 2020.