A Brief History

The first version of the toolbox was accomplished by the beginning of 1991. The basic ideas are summarixed in the Appendix. It has been distributed by The MathWorks since 1994. Its author is István Kollár  , who has been cooperating since 1989 with Johan Schoukens   and Rik Pintelon   from Belgium. The theory behind the toolbox is summarized in the book of Schoukens and Pintelon [10]. A completely renewed version of this book is currently in preparation.

The first two versions of the toolbox are based on the possibilities of MATLAB V3.5, later V4.2. These MATLAB versions already offer tools for each important task in identification, but the toolbox contains only command-line functions, and these functions often need to be called in a complicated way. V4.2 already offered a good way to design graphical user interfaces, but this was that time not utilized yet.

By the beginning of 1996, MATLAB V5 offered new, exciting capabilities, in addition to the ones already present in V4.2. This paved the way for the development of an already planned new Graphical User Interface (GUI),   of data and model objects, and of new, simple function interfaces. This development was accomplished by István Kollár, Gyula Román and Gyula Simon. We present here the Graphical User Interface and the new objects . The general trend of current developments points towards simple-to-use tools, and the Graphical User Interface is a good example for this.