How can I install MATLAB 5.3 onto a 64-bit computer?

I am often outside of wireless coverage.

[Wilson Marquina]

Wow! MatLab 5.3 was the best. The best developments, the best simulations, the best mathematical models I developed with Matlab - Simulink 5.3. What came next is a nonsense. A long heavy, unnecessary weight ballast. Now they want everything "Made" to measure, I think that this is not how this human intelligence works.Wow! MatLab 5.3 was the best. The best developments, the best simulations, the best mathematical models I developed with Matlab - Simulink 5.3. What came next is a nonsense. A long heavy, unnecessary weight ballast. Now they want everything "Made" to measure, I think that this is not how this human intelligence works.

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

Why do you want to install a 14 year old version?

Have you tried it? It might be able to run in 32 bit mode. I wonder if it would do the authentication part and if that would succeed, since it's so old. Though there is a non-network way of installing - I think it involves sending authentication codes via email or calling them on the phone.

[Walter Roberson]

Was it 5.3 that was in the MATLAB book?

Answer 2

[Daniel Shub]

Given performance is clearly not a concern if you are running a pre JIT version, why not just create a 32-bit virtual machine that runs Windows 98? Assuming a host machine with a reasonable spec, I doubt it would miss the few cpu cycles, 500 MB of disk space, and the 16 MB of RAM that Windows 98 requires.

Seriously, you should just consider spending the money for a stand alone license.

Answer 3

[Jan]

Are you talking about WinXP, 7 or 8?

The installer of v5.3 does not run under Windows7. Even the compatibility modes do not help, because the installer contains 16 bit programs, which cannot be emulated on 64 bit machines anymore. I have not been able to install Matlab 6.5 under Windows 7 due to the same reason, although the actual program is a pure 32-bit application. Perhaps it would be possible to install Matlab on a USB stick, but after discussions with the technical support it got clear, that this would violate the license conditions.

Therefore I run Matlab 6.5 in a virtual 32bit XP machine under Win7/64. This works fluently, except for the old tedious warnings about the exhausted notification handles.

Running 5.3 would have severe side effects:

• There are a lot of incompatibilities to current Matlab versions: No dynamic field names S.('field'), no MExceptions for TRY/CATCH, no true / false, no short-circuting operators && and ||, no REGEXP, MOVEFILE, WINOPEN, TIMER, no mfilename('fullpath'), no numel(), no internal casting in fread(), no OpenGL rendering, no uigetdir, no function handles, no continue in loops, no cast and typecast, no regexp, no ancestor, no dataread (which is outdated again, so even no textscan), no strfind, but the dangerous findstr. Most algebraic functions are not defined for single or integer types, no (u)int64, ...
• Some serious bugs exist in 5.3.
• This means that you have to debug all your code twice under remarkably different conditions, when you run 5.3 and a modern version.
• The editor is known to crash frequently. After I've struggeled for 2 years with it, I still press Ctrl-S every 5 minutes - even when I'm in this forum.
• The startup time and the delays in the editor are extremely short: No huge Java libs are loaded, no smart but costly MLint parsing, no ugly Java thrilled GUIs. You will feel real pain when you return to a current version of Matlab.
• Inspite of the missing JIT acceleration, Matlab 5.3 runs really fast, at least for an old version of my medium-sized program (150'000 lines of code, all bottleneck-loops implemented as single threaded C-Mex). 40% of the time are spend with import and export to the hard-disk, such that the Matlab version does not have a significant influence, other 40% (under 5.3!) are spend with creating a bunch of complex figures with a lot of diagrams, lines, patchs, buttons and legends. And due to the modern Java basement, this part needs 4 times longer in Matlab 2011b. So guess, if the remaining 20% processing time can be accelerated by modern partially multi-threaded toolbox functions and super-Jitting.
• But on the other hand: The old code has >2400 MLint warnings (which I do not fix, because I maintain a modern version of this program with the double number of lines now). Fixing them or fighting with the bugs would cost much more time than the faster runtime can save.

So I strongly recommend not to develop code under Matlab 5.3 anymore and not to amputate current code to be backward compatible to this old version.