Netlib
More info
- Creator
- Jack Dongarra, Eric Grosse
- Released
- 1985
- Type
- Software repository
- Website
- netlib.org
A repository of numerical software, started in 1985, that mailed source code to anyone who put the right command in an email.
Jack Dongarra at Argonne and Eric Grosse at Bell Labs wanted to get scientific libraries such as LINPACK and EISPACK to researchers who had email but no direct network access. The answer was a robot: send a message containing send index and the table of contents came back; write send dgesv from lapack and you got that routine along with whatever it depended on. Most of it was Fortran.
The scheme was written up in Communications of the ACM in 1987 and is a close relative of FTPmail, which did the same for general FTP archives. Netlib later gained FTP and web front ends but still lives at the same address, and plenty of its routines remain buried inside today's scientific computing libraries.