Who would you credit for discovering the SVD method?
Who would have first coded SVD?
Does 1984 Waterloo ring a bell? (That was the indirect origin of my first copy on reel to reel in C, but I do not know who wrote it.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_value_decomposition
The History section strikes me as likely to be accurate. Also it has to predate 1984 since it was earlier in EISPACK.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EISPACK