MATLAB, short for MATrix LABoratory, was written in the late 1970s by Cleve Moler, then chair of the computer science department at the University of New Mexico, and became a commercial product in 1984 when MathWorks was founded. To see how Cleve Moler's MATLAB grew out of LINPACK, you have to start with the Fortran libraries Moler had helped write and the students who found those libraries too hard to use.
How Cleve Moler's MATLAB grew out of LINPACK
In the 1970s Moler was one of the authors of LINPACK, a Fortran library for linear equations, and was involved with EISPACK, a library for eigenvalue problems. Both were high quality, but using them meant writing, compiling and linking Fortran programs. Moler wanted his students to be able to invert a matrix or compute eigenvalues by typing a single line.
He wrote an interactive matrix calculator in Fortran. Its parser followed the design of PL/0, the small teaching language from Niklaus Wirth's book Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs. The first MATLAB had one data type, the matrix, and a small set of built-in functions. Moler gave copies away, and it spread through universities in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
At Stanford, engineer Jack Little saw its potential for control engineering. With Steve Bangert he rewrote MATLAB in C, added user-defined functions in M-files, toolboxes and graphics, and in 1984 Little, Bangert and Moler founded The MathWorks. The first commercial version ran on the IBM PC.
Design and key features
- Everything is an array: a scalar is a 1-by-1 matrix, and operations work on whole arrays without explicit loops.
- Concise linear algebra syntax:
A*Bis matrix multiplication,A.*Bis element-wise, andA\bsolves a linear system. - 1-based indexing and column-major storage, inherited from Fortran.
- Integrated plotting with
plot,surfand related functions. - Toolboxes for signal processing, control systems, optimisation, statistics, image processing and more.
- Interactive environment with a command window, editor, debugger and, since 2016, the Live Editor for notebook-style documents.
A = [4 -2 1; 3 6 -4; 2 1 8];
b = [12; -25; 32];
x = A \ b % solve the linear system A*x = b
t = linspace(0, 2*pi, 200);
plot(t, sin(t), t, cos(t))
legend('sin', 'cos')
title('Two lines of MATLAB')The backslash operator picks a suitable factorisation automatically. That one character is a fair summary of MATLAB's appeal: decades of numerical analysis hidden behind notation close to what an engineer writes on paper.
Releases and milestones
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| late 1970s | Moler's Fortran MATLAB, distributed free |
| 1984 | MathWorks founded; first commercial MATLAB |
| 1990 | Simulink (first called SIMULAB) for block-diagram simulation |
| 2002 | MATLAB 6.5 adds a JIT accelerator |
| 2006 | Twice-yearly releases begin with R2006a |
| 2008 | classdef object-oriented syntax (R2008a) |
| 2016 | Live Editor and .mlx live scripts |
LINPACK and EISPACK were later replaced internally by LAPACK and optimised BLAS libraries, but the user-facing language stayed recognisably the same.
Where MATLAB is used
MATLAB is a standard tool in engineering education and industry. Automotive and aerospace companies use MATLAB and Simulink to design control systems and generate embedded C code. It is common in signal and image processing, communications, robotics, financial modelling and academic research across physics, biology and neuroscience. Many university courses in linear algebra and numerical methods are taught with it.
Influence and legacy
MATLAB's success inspired open source alternatives. GNU Octave, started by John W. Eaton, aims for high compatibility with MATLAB syntax, and Scilab came out of INRIA in France. Python's NumPy and Matplotlib borrowed much of MATLAB's array style and plotting interface, and Julia, released in 2012, set out explicitly to offer MATLAB-like convenience with much higher performance.
Is MATLAB still used today?
Yes, widely, especially in engineering companies and universities that rely on Simulink and specialised toolboxes, though Python has taken a large share of general data science and research work. MathWorks still ships two releases a year. Knowing how Cleve Moler's MATLAB grew out of LINPACK, as a way to spare students from writing Fortran, explains why the language still puts matrices first and makes numerical work feel like writing equations.
Frequently asked questions
What does MATLAB stand for?
MATLAB stands for MATrix LABoratory. The name reflects its original purpose as an interactive laboratory for matrix computations built on the LINPACK and EISPACK libraries.
Was the original MATLAB free?
Yes. Cleve Moler's Fortran version from the late 1970s was distributed freely to universities and research groups. The commercial product sold by MathWorks from 1984 was a new implementation in C with many added features.
Is GNU Octave the same as MATLAB?
No, but it is close. Octave is a free, independent program that runs most MATLAB scripts with little or no change. It lacks Simulink and many commercial toolboxes, and some newer MATLAB features and performance optimisations differ.
