MATLAB Programming/Bonus Chapters/History of MATLAB

History of MATLAB
During the late 1970's and early 1980's, Cleve Moler develop mathematical software package during his tenure as mathematics professor in University New Mexico as supplement teaching tools for his Numerical Analysis course.

His motivation at that time is to let his student to write EISPACK and LINPACK without having to code in FORTRAN programming languages. For this version of MATLAB1.0, there is only 71 mathematics functions at the beginning (which are built out of EISPACK and LINPACK). Soon enough, the program package found its ways to other applied mathematics department around the USA. During this time, a student introduced MATLAB future co-founder, Jack Little. Jack Little had been in the graduate engineering program at Stanford and he adopted it for his own work.

In 1984, Cleve Moler co-founded MATLAB with Jack Little in California to commercialize and develop MATLAB. Jack Little suggested the creation of a commercial product based on MATLAB. He left his job and bought a Compaq® PC. Jack Little, together with Steve Banger spent 1.5 years to reprogram the MATLAB into C programming languages. Basically, the MATLAB version 1 is functioning like a matrix calculator and it is without any sophisticated features unlike today versions of MATLAB such as plotting, advance maths functions such as ODE, FFT, etc. PC-MATLAB made its debut in December 1984 at the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in Las Vegas with some of most significant features such as functions, toolboxes, and graphics.