Symbolic Interactive Matrix Processing Language and MATLAB

Student oriented software became a focus at UT from 1971, championed by faculty such as John Allen, Joseph Lagowski, and George Culp. The efforts centered in the Project Computer-Based Education office in the aerospace building, still referred to as the Engineering Sciences Building at the time but changed to WRW soon after. The project was a high-level initiative at UT Austin, researching how students learn through computer-assisted instruction and designed as a five-year curriculum development effort, 1971 through 1975, involving seventy-five professors and over 4,000 students in the creation of classroom modules. 

Probably the most significant artifact of the instructional ecosystem was the Symbolic Interactive Matrix Processing Language, or Simple, a direct ancestor of the commercial Matlab environment still common in engineering today. Conceived as a conversational, matrix-oriented programming language, Simple was designed as a bridge for beginners in engineering who needed to work with sophisticated matrix calculations despite minimal prior computational experience. The focus was on computer-based teaching techniques in undergraduate science and engineering education and transforming the teaching of linear algebra and numerical analysis. It was generally used via remote terminals, specifically acoustically coupled Datapoint terminals and standard teletypes, which allowed students to bypass the delays of traditional batch computing. It included a Teach command that was central to the instructional shift, providing self-paced, inquiry-based documentation that enabled students to obtain quick results and proceed at their own rate. For the mature user in aerospace or structural engineering, Simple provided rigorous tools for complex operations, including essential matrix decompositions. By accommodating both batch and timesharing modes, Simple ensured its own survival and grounded high-level engineering research in a versatile, interactive everyday tool. 

The workaday success of Simple and Matlab has demonstrated the real-world value of this type of code. Despite a distinct lack of glamour and hype, they endure because they reflect a deep connection between engineering and computational modeling and simulation. This special corner of the software world and its particular links to the engineering world are well worth further exploration. A quote from Matlab’s creator Cleve Moler captures this, here he's discussing the course he taught at Stanford circa 1980. 

The computer science students and numerical students were not very impressed. This was not a sophisticated language, they were taking courses from Don Knuth and John McCarthy, and so on, who did real computer science. There was not much mathematics going on here, these algorithms were old, traditional algorithms, there was no convergence theory, no partial differential equations, this was not the usual fare for the graduate course in matrix computation. The other half of the students in that class were students that had come from various departments in engineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, nuclear engineering, they knew about matrices, they’d used matrices a lot in their theoretical work, many of their textbooks described things in terms of matrices. They had done computation with matrices using Fortran. Some of them knew about LINPACK and EISPACK, when they saw MATLAB they thought this was terrific.

Moler created Matlab in the mid seventies at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and it would be good to learn how much influence Simple had on the beginnings of Matlab. There were definite connections between UT and New Mexico, particularly in the context of White Sands and Los Alamos. 

Aerospace building before it was renamed WRW. Engineering Laboratories, completed 1960. Home of Project Computer-Based Education.

Former site of WRW, lower center.

[1] Oral History Interview with Cleve Moler.

[2] 1972 Project C-BE article in the Alcade.

[3] 1976 Creative Computing article mentioning Project C-BE.