Brief History of Matlab Cleve Moler is the chairman of the computer science department at the University of New Mexico, He started developing MATLAB in the late 1970s. He designed it to give his students access to LINPACK and EISPACK without them having tolearn Fortran. It soon spread to other universities and found a strong audience within the applied mathematics MATLAB was first adopted by researchers and practitioners in control engineering. Little's specialty, but quickly spread to many other domains. It is now also used in education, in particularhe teaching of linear algebra and numerical analysis, and is popular amongst scientists involved in image processing