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I wasn't around for too much of the 1980s, but I think there was a qualitatively similar hype cycle starting in the late 1970s. MINOS, CPLEX, XpressMP, OSL, KORBX, GAMS, AMPL, and many other optimisation packages came out of that period. Those packages were not free software or open-source software, but they were available to researchers at universities in the First World. (It seems unfair to expect software from 1978 to be free software or open-source software as we understand it today given that the FSF dates to 1985 and the term "open-source" to the late 1990s. Also bear in mind that personal computing was in its own initial boom in the 1980s.) Papadimitrou and Steiglitz's book (published 1982; I have the 1998 Dover edition) has an exercise (Chapter 15, exercise 19) in which you are to read a short 1979 New York Times article about the ellipsoid algorithm and "[d]etermine, where possible, whether each statement is (a) true, (b) false, (c) misleading, [or] (d) equivalent to a well-known conjecture, the solution of which was probably not known to [the article's author]." There's a longer article written by the same author 20 days earlier, too, and that one has more unfounded speculation about applications of LP: https://www.nytimes.com/1979/11/07/archives/a-soviet-discove... Karmarkar's 1984 interior-point method begat similar excitement, leading to a few thousand papers through the late 1990s, and a trickle still today, on interior-point algorithms of varying correctness, generality and efficiency. The technology that came out of that hype cycle is phenomenally capable and usable, and it's subsequently been improved even further. |