alt Hacker NewsCleve 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-...
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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.
MATLAB competed in the same space with a piece of software called GAUSS. Both had their initial commercial release in 1984. MATLAB eventually went on to dominate most areas, but I had to deal with the pain of writing my dissertation in GAUSS, which continues to be heavily used in specific areas today.
I didn’t know his name but certainly knew about MATLAB. He sounds worthy of a black bar to me.
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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.