The story
MATLAB (MATrix LABoratory) was created in the 1970s by Cleve Moler, who was chairman of the computer science department at the University of New Mexico at the time. It was a free tool for academics. Jack Little, who would eventually set up the company, came across the tool while he was a graduate student in electrical engineering at Stanford University.
Little and Steve Bangert rewrote the code for MATLAB in C while they were colleagues at an engineering firm. They founded MathWorks along with Moler in 1984, with Little running it out of his house in Portola Valley, California. Little would mail diskettes in baggies (food storage bags) to the first customers. The company sold its first order, 10 copies of MATLAB, for $500 to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in February 1985. A few years later, Little and the company moved to Massachusetts. There, Little hired Jeanne O'Keefe, an experienced computer executive, to help formalize the business. By 1997, MathWorks was profitable, claiming revenue of around $50 million, and had around 380 employees.
Since 1993 an open source alternative, GNU Octave (mostly compatible with matlab) and scilab (similar to matlab) have been available.
In 1999, MathWorks relocated to the Apple Hill office complex in Natick, Massachusetts, purchasing additional buildings in the complex in 2008 and 2009, ultimately occupying the entire campus. MathWorks expanded further in 2013 by buying Boston Scientific's old headquarters campus, which is near to MathWorks' headquarters in Natick.
By 2018, the company had around 3,000 employees in Natick and said it had revenues of around $900 million.
On May 18, 2025, MathWorks was the target of a ransomware attack which took down online applications for over a week.
From Wikipedia’s article on MathWorks, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5