moler@bravery.Stanford.EDU (Cleve Moler) (05/15/89)
From time to time, requests for information on the availability
of MATLAB appear in various newsgroups. I am the author of
MATLAB and will try to respond to these requests without
sounding too commercial.
There are two versions of MATLAB. I wrote the first, which we now
refer to as "classic MATLAB", over the period from 1977 to 1984,
while I was on the faculty at the University of Mexico. It is
an interactive matrix laboratory, written in Fortran, which uses
some of the subroutines from LINPACK and EISPACK. I distributed
a few hundred copies of the source code, usually charging a
$100-or-so service charge, and including a letter requesting
that it not be redistributed. I never used the term "public domain".
The second version, written in C by Steve Bangert and John Little,
is the basis for a family of products from The MathWorks, Inc.,
a company which Bangert, Little and I founded in 1985. These
products are called PC-MATLAB, Mac-MATLAB, Pro-MATLAB, etc.
They are MUCH more powerful than the classic version, particularly
with respect to graphics and programability, and much faster
in execution.
I obviously recommend that anyone interested in using MATLAB
acquire the MathWorks version appropriate for his or her machine.
In addition to my commercial interest, I believe the MathWorks
versions are preferable scientifically, educationally, and, in the
long run, economically. (I am not responsible for MathWorks
pricing policy, but I think the educational discounts are very
attractive.)
There are still some good reasons for wanting the old Fortran
source code. For example, MathWorks may not yet have a product
for your machine. If this is the case, please let me know and
we'll be glad to help you out. (If all you want is the matrix
computation subroutines, get LINPACK and EISPACK instead.
We do not distribute LINPACK and EISPACK in C.)
I would appreciate it if anybody who is redistributing my
original code would forward requests to me instead.
Thanks to all those who have helped make MATLAB successful.
But, I haven't used my own version for almost 5 years. I hope
that everybody else will join me in using the modern ones.
-- Cleve Moler
moler@na-net.stanford.edu
The MathWorks, Inc.
21 Eliot Street
South Natick, MA 01760
508-653-1415