Three former MathWorks employees, Steve Wilcockson, David Bergstein, and Gareth Thomas, joined the ArrayCast pod cast to discuss their work on array based languages. At the end of the episode, Steve says,
> It's a little known fact about MATLAB. There's this thing, Gareth has talked about the community. One of the things MATLAB did very, very early was built the MATLAB community, the so-called MATLAB File Exchange, which came about in the early 2000s. And it was where people would share code sets, M files, et cetera. This was long before GitHub came around. This was well ahead of its time. And I think there are other places too, where MATLAB has delivered cultural benefits over and above the kind of core programming and mathematical capabilities too. So, you know, MATLAB Central, File Exchange, very much saw the future.
Listen here: The ArrayCast, Episode 79, May 10, 2024.
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Thanks for sharing this @Adam Danz. We've created a timeline of the community on the About page starting from 1992 - I don't think too many people are aware of it or how long MATLAB Central has been around.
The launch of comp.soft-sys.matlab caught my eye in early 1993. I was so impressed by how people like Clay Thompson, Loren Shure, Cleve Moler, and Jack Little (he signed his posts "John Little" back then) frequently responded to user comments and questions. This helped convince me to look for a job at MathWorks later that year.
For those who are curious, here's the comp.soft-sys.matlab group filtered from 1992-2012 which was prior to MATLAB Answers forum.
I found some questions/comments I wrote when I was having trouble with GUIDE 10+ years ago 😂
I think I found my first posting to CSSM (comp.soft-sys.matlab) as a MathWorker, shortly after I joined the company, in that archive.
Ha! Also related to GUIDE!
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