Cleve Moler was one of the big names in numerical methods, and participated in creation of canonical FORTRAN libraries for solving linear equations, and matrix algorithms more generally.
To teach this more conveniently to his students, he wrote the original version of MATrixLABoratory to allow interactive exploration of the library functions without having to compile FORTRAN code. The original version was about 2000 lines of code in FORTRAN.
Engineering students loved it so much that he decided to make a company around this product. His buddy expanded and rewrote the interpreter in C, for a PC, and the rest is history:
"In 1983 Jack Little suggested the creation of a commercial product based on MATLAB. I said I thought that was a good idea, but I didn't join him initially. The IBM PC had been introduced only two years earlier and was barely powerful enough to run something like MATLAB, but Little anticipated its evolution. He left his job, bought a Compaq PC clone at Sears, moved into the hills behind Stanford, and, with my encouragement, spent a year and a half creating a new and extended version of MATLAB written in C. A friend, Steve Bangert, joined the project and worked on the new MATLAB in his spare time."
A true giant. His algorithm for Pythagorean addition, which computes sqrt(a^2 + b^2) without taking square roots, is a wonderful gem.
Fun anecdote about early Matlab. In the '80s, while in high school, I "acquired" the source code of an early version of matlab, similar to the one that you linked. An email from Cleve Moler in 1990 asked people not to distribute the code, so I didn't give it to anybody. In the late '90s I visited Cleve Moler at his Mathworks office, and he proudly showed the early Matlab running on DOS, remarking that he only had that binary but had lost the source code. So I gave it to him.
Matlab inspired the scilab ecosystem, which is based on numpy, scipy, matplotlib, pandas. This was a major driver for the data science industry for a decade before AI kicked in and tensorflow, etc. was also built ontop of these libraries.
While I personally try to avoid contemporary matlab at any cost, the open source ecosystem is great and matlab would be my go-to tool if they would not exist.
MATLAB was used extensively during my electronics eng degree 20+ years ago. You could do pretty much about anything with it: signal processing, neural networks t, simulations, anything... It was what made me take an interest into programming. Sad day. RIP Cleve.
IMO this deserves a black banner/bar. I genuinely had no idea a single guy was behind MATLAB (or that it was so old). His contribution has been significant, to say the least.
I also barely knew Cleve directly, but his impact and insight was legendary. I got to work at The Mathworks early in my career, and the respect Cleve had was clearly deserved. Technically brilliant, but also with a keen foresight for where the industry was going and how to best serve it. RIP
I feel sad by this. I have a strong love hate relationship with MATLAB. I think that happens with anything you use for 15 years. But I have always respected the software and its professional quality documentation. On the business side he created kind of a perfect existence for himself. A profitable company which they have still kept private so they can focus on things they want to solve.
How very sad. Whilst not my piece of software of choice, it is definitely still used by plenty to do cool work. I do think it will eventually be surpassed by Python and Julia but it still has it's place right now.
Amazing impact that person had. Although MATLAB probably kind of outdated these days as anything can be accomplished in Julia and Py and I remember deploying that software being deliberately made difficult by this being shareware. When I studied almost everybody ended up using MATLAB during their study and almost everybody ended up hating it when it came to publishing results and doing demonstrations.
Cleve Moler was one of the big names in numerical methods, and participated in creation of canonical FORTRAN libraries for solving linear equations, and matrix algorithms more generally.
To teach this more conveniently to his students, he wrote the original version of MATrixLABoratory to allow interactive exploration of the library functions without having to compile FORTRAN code. The original version was about 2000 lines of code in FORTRAN.
Engineering students loved it so much that he decided to make a company around this product. His buddy expanded and rewrote the interpreter in C, for a PC, and the rest is history:
"In 1983 Jack Little suggested the creation of a commercial product based on MATLAB. I said I thought that was a good idea, but I didn't join him initially. The IBM PC had been introduced only two years earlier and was barely powerful enough to run something like MATLAB, but Little anticipated its evolution. He left his job, bought a Compaq PC clone at Sears, moved into the hills behind Stanford, and, with my encouragement, spent a year and a half creating a new and extended version of MATLAB written in C. A friend, Steve Bangert, joined the project and worked on the new MATLAB in his spare time."
User guide for the original version of MATLAB: https://blogs.mathworks.com/cleve/2018/02/05/the-historic-ma...
The source code of the very early (1982?) FORTRAN version of MATLAB: https://github.com/johnsonjh/matlab
The origins of the first PC version: https://blogs.mathworks.com/cleve/2018/03/09/matlab-history-...
A true giant. His algorithm for Pythagorean addition, which computes sqrt(a^2 + b^2) without taking square roots, is a wonderful gem.
Fun anecdote about early Matlab. In the '80s, while in high school, I "acquired" the source code of an early version of matlab, similar to the one that you linked. An email from Cleve Moler in 1990 asked people not to distribute the code, so I didn't give it to anybody. In the late '90s I visited Cleve Moler at his Mathworks office, and he proudly showed the early Matlab running on DOS, remarking that he only had that binary but had lost the source code. So I gave it to him.
I haven't realized MATLAB was that old. It's one of the earliest software for PC yet still almost without alternative for engineers in 2026.
I didn’t know his name but certainly knew about MATLAB. He sounds worthy of a black bar to me.
Matlab inspired the scilab ecosystem, which is based on numpy, scipy, matplotlib, pandas. This was a major driver for the data science industry for a decade before AI kicked in and tensorflow, etc. was also built ontop of these libraries.
While I personally try to avoid contemporary matlab at any cost, the open source ecosystem is great and matlab would be my go-to tool if they would not exist.
MATLAB was used extensively during my electronics eng degree 20+ years ago. You could do pretty much about anything with it: signal processing, neural networks t, simulations, anything... It was what made me take an interest into programming. Sad day. RIP Cleve.
Yes (and Simulink helped a lot)
I mean of course you can do them all without simulink but it was much easier
IMO this deserves a black banner/bar. I genuinely had no idea a single guy was behind MATLAB (or that it was so old). His contribution has been significant, to say the least.
I only met him twice, so I don't have much to say, but let me share Alan's message instead, since he knew him well: https://discourse.julialang.org/t/cleve-moler-rip/137235.
I also barely knew Cleve directly, but his impact and insight was legendary. I got to work at The Mathworks early in my career, and the respect Cleve had was clearly deserved. Technically brilliant, but also with a keen foresight for where the industry was going and how to best serve it. RIP
I was honored to have worked with Cleve at Ardent Computer. He ran the benchmark and demo group squeezing performance out of thin air.
Great mathematician and a wonderful human being. I never stopped learning when I was around him. thttps://blogs.mathworks.com/cleve/2013/11/25/the-ardent-tita...
I feel sad by this. I have a strong love hate relationship with MATLAB. I think that happens with anything you use for 15 years. But I have always respected the software and its professional quality documentation. On the business side he created kind of a perfect existence for himself. A profitable company which they have still kept private so they can focus on things they want to solve.
How very sad. Whilst not my piece of software of choice, it is definitely still used by plenty to do cool work. I do think it will eventually be surpassed by Python and Julia but it still has it's place right now.
Amazing impact that person had. Although MATLAB probably kind of outdated these days as anything can be accomplished in Julia and Py and I remember deploying that software being deliberately made difficult by this being shareware. When I studied almost everybody ended up using MATLAB during their study and almost everybody ended up hating it when it came to publishing results and doing demonstrations.