Category: MATLAB

What is History of MATLAB ?

Cleve Moler is the creator of MATLAB. Moler was a numerical analyst specializing in matrix computation. Cleve Moler, the chairman of the computer-science department at the University of New Mexico, started developing MATLAB in the late 1970s. In the early 1970s, Moler participated in an effort organized by Argonne National Laboratory to produce a library of reliable, efficient FORTRAN subroutines for computing the eigenvalues of matrices (EISPACK) and solving systems of linear equations (LINPACK). In order to make these packages easier for students to use, Moler created MATLAB, whose name is a contraction of “Matrix Laboratory“. The original MATLAB was a FORTRAN program, designed for the era of time-sharing and ASCII terminals. It had only one data type (the matrix of complex doubles) and a fixed collection of 80 functions. Moler used the FORTRAN MATLAB in teaching numerical analysis at Stanford in 1979. Jack Little, an engineer, was exposed to it during a visit Moler made to Stanford University in 1983. Recognizing its commercial potential, he joined with Moler and Steve Bangert. Word of the program reached Jack Little, who grasped the potential of MATLAB in signal processing and control, and the possibility of making a successful software product based on MATLAB for the new IBM PC.

He designed it to give his students access to LINPACK and EISPACK without them having to learn FORTRAN.

Little and Steve Bangert developed PC MATLAB by porting Moler’s code from FORTRAN to C, adding user-defined functions (in effect making MATLAB into a programming language rather than a calculator), improved graphics, and libraries of MATLAB routines, the toolboxes. Moler, Little, and Bangert formed the Mathworks in 1984, with PC MATLAB as the first product. Their first sale was an order for ten copies placed by Professor Nick Trefethen at MIT.

Growth and Development

 MATLAB has indeed been a commercial success from the beginning, growing to more than 1,000,000 users and by 2006 to 1,200 Mathworkers, as the employees of Mathworks are known. MATLAB has, in effect, become the common language for the informal exchange of software and for algorithmic experiment in technical computing. The company remains privately held.

There have been several major revisions and enhancements to MATLAB, including an extended set of graphics tools and primitives, multidimensional arrays and lists (known in MATLAB as cell arrays), classes and objects, economical storage schemes and algorithms for sparse matrices, a debugger, a profiler, a GUI builder, a lower cost student edition, and Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation for improved performance. The computational core has been upgraded through the incorporation LAPACK (a state-of-the-art library for matrix computation), as well as software for computation of definite integrals, integration of ordinary differential equations, and root finders. 

The Mathworks logo is a picture (generated by MATLAB) of a numerical approximation to the fundamental mode of a vibrating L-shaped membrane, a topic that Moler discussed in his Stanford Ph.D. thesis in 1965.

Toolboxes created by the Mathworks and other contributors have expanded the scope of MATLAB, adding capabilities in areas such asoptimization, signal and image processing, fuzzy logic, splines, wavelets, statistics, partial differential equations, bioinformatics, and mathematical finance. SIMULINK, aeronautical ,  an extensible block diagram environment for simulation and model-based design appeared as a second Mathworks product in 1990.

 

What is GUI in MATLAB?

Introduction of Graphical User Interface: A graphical user interface (GUI) is a pictorial interface to a program. A good GUI can make programs easier to use by providing them with a consistent appearance and with intuitive controls like pushbuttons, list boxes, sliders, menus, and so forth. The GUI should behave in an understandable and predictable manner, so that a user knows what to expect when he or she performs an action. For example, when a mouse click occurs on a pushbutton, the GUI should initiate the action described on the label of the button. This chapter introduces the basic elements of the MATLAB GUIs. The chapter does not contain a complete description of components or GUI features, but it does provide the basics required to create functional GUIs for your programs.

A graphical user interface(GUI), often  pronounced    gooey , is  a  type  of  user  interface  that  allows  users  to interact  with  programs  in  more  ways  than  typing  such  as computers  ; hand – held  devices  such  as  MP3  players ,  portable  media  players  or  gaming  devices ;  household appliances  and  office  equipment  with  images  rather  than text  commands .  A  GUI  offers  graphical  icons ,  and  visual indicators ,  as  opposed  to  text – based  interfaces ,  typed command  labels  or  text  navigation  to  fully  represent   the information  and  actions  available  to  a  user .  The  actions  are  usually  performed  through  direct  manipulation  of  the graphical  elements.