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MATLAB was invented by mathematician and computer programmer Cleve Moler.[1] The idea for MATLAB was based on his 1960s PhD thesis.[1] Moler became a math professor at the University of New Mexico and started developing MATLAB for his students[1] as a hobby.[2] He developed MATLAB's initial linear algebra programming in 1967 with his one-time thesis advisor, George Forsythe.[1] This was followed by Fortran code for linear equations in 1971.[1]
The first early version of MATLAB was completed in the late 1970s.[1] The software was disclosed to the public for the first time in February 1979 at the Naval Postgraduate School in California.[2] Early versions of MATLAB were simple matrix calculators with 71 pre-built functions.[3] At the time, MATLAB was distributed for free[4][5] to universities.[6] Moler would leave copies at universities he visited and the software developed a cult-like following in the math departments of university campuses.[7]: 5
In the 1980s, Cleve Moler met John N. Little. They decided to reprogram MATLAB in C and market it for the IBM desktops that were replacing mainframe computers at the time.[1] John Little and programmer Steve Bangert re-programmed MATLAB in C, created the MATLAB programming language, and developed features for toolboxes.[2]
MATLAB was first released as a commercial product in 1984 at the Automatic Control Conference in Las Vegas.[1][2] MathWorks, Inc. was founded to develop the software[5] and the MATLAB programming language was released.[3] The first MATLAB sale was the following year, when Nick Trefethen from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology bought ten copies.[2][8]
By the end of the 1980s, several hundred copies of MATLAB had been sold to universities for student use.[2] The software was popularized largely thanks to toolboxes created by experts in various fields for performing specialized mathematical tasks.[4] Many of the toolboxes were developed as a result of Stanford students that used MATLAB in academia, then brought the software with them to the private sector.[2]
Over time, MATLAB was re-written for early operating systems created by Digital Equipment Corporation, VAX, Sun Microsystems, and for Unix PCs.[2][3] Version 3 was released in 1987.[9] The first MATLAB compiler was developed by Stephen C. Johnson in the 1990s.[3]
In 2000, MathWorks added a Fortran-based library for linear algebra in MATLAB 6, replacing the software's original LINPACK and EISPACK subroutines that were in C.[3] MATLAB's Parallel Computing Toolbox was released at the 2004 Supercomputing Conference and support for graphics processing units (GPUs) was added to it in 2010.[3]
Some especially large changes to the software were made with version 8 in 2012.[10] The user interface was reworked[11]: 517 and Simulink's functionality was expanded.[12] By 2016, MATLAB had introduced several technical and user interface improvements, including the MATLAB Live Editor notebook, and other features.[3]
Bober 2013 p. 517
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).