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SPSS History

SPSS was first released in 1968 as a statistical software package for social scientists. It was originally written in FORTRAN, allowing it to run on many computer systems. In 1975, the creators of SPSS formed SPSS Inc. to commercialize the software. SPSS was ported to Windows in 1992, introducing an easy-to-use graphical user interface. In 2009, IBM acquired SPSS Inc. and the software is now marketed as IBM SPSS Statistics.

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296 views2 pages

SPSS History

SPSS was first released in 1968 as a statistical software package for social scientists. It was originally written in FORTRAN, allowing it to run on many computer systems. In 1975, the creators of SPSS formed SPSS Inc. to commercialize the software. SPSS was ported to Windows in 1992, introducing an easy-to-use graphical user interface. In 2009, IBM acquired SPSS Inc. and the software is now marketed as IBM SPSS Statistics.

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Agrieliø De Lazø II
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History of SPSS

SPSS, an acronym for Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, first appeared in 1968.
Interestingly, the marketing department today will only refer to SPSS by its acronym because it wants
to de-emphasize its original target audience of social scientists and try to encourage (and
appropiately so) use of the program by a broader group of researchers. For a couple of years in
2009, the product was renamed PASW (short for Predictive Analytics SoftWare), but that name
change was reversed because of the large customer awareness of the SPSS brand name.

The development team, Norman Nie, Hadlai Hull, and Dale Bent, were all working at Stanford
University at the time. Dr. Nie moved to the National Opinion Research Center at the University of
Chicago and continues distribution of the program from that University. The actual program was first
distributed for free, but the authors of the first SPSS manual (Nie, Bent, and Hull) made a fair
amount of money from book royalties. In 1975, to avoid jeopardizing the non profit status of the
University, Drs. Nie and Hull created SPSS, Incorporated.

SPSS was originally written in FORTRAN, and some of the legacy of that FORTRAN code still
remains, such as the distinction between short strings (8 characters or less) and long strings (more
than 8 characters). But because SPSS was written in FORTRAN, it was available, even during its
early years on a broad range of minicomputers and mainframe computers. By contrast, SAS, written
in a mix of PL/1, FORTRAN, and IBM Assembler Language, was limited at first to IBM mainframes.

SPSS was ported to Microsoft computers in 1984 and to the Windows operating system in 1992.
While earlier versions of SPSS required knowledge of the SPSS programming language, the
Windows version introduced an easy to use menu based interface that is close to comprehensive.
This is in sharp contrast to the menu based interfaces for R and SAS which are not as tightly
integrated into the program and which only cover a subset of the total number of features of these
packages.

Much of the code for the graphical user interface was re-written in Java in 2007 for version 16 to
simplify the process of porting to multiple computers and to allow greater flexibility in the use of their
dialog boxes. SPSS also recently added Python capabilities to allow for more efficient processing of
macro codes.

Over the years, SPSS has added various modules to the package to handle advanced methods like
multiple imputation, complex survey data analysis, and text mining. SPSS also marketed AMOS, a
popular program for Structural Equations Modeling.

In 2009, SPSS Incorporated was purchased by IBM. In promotional literature, the package is now
called called IBM SPSS Statistics.

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