Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS)

In 1968, Normal Nie and Dale Bent, Stanford doctoral candidates, and Hadlai Hull, a Stanford graduate with a master's in business administration, developed a software system that allowed for the transformation of raw data into information using statistical applications. Their creation, the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), was not developed with the intent of mass distribution. However, its appeal quickly caught on and, soon after its development, it was in high demand in universities across the United States. This demand further increased after McGraw-Hill published the first SPSS user's manual in 1970. SPSS incorporated in 1975.

SPSS, Inc. offered the first mainframe statistical package to appear on a personal computer (in the mid-1980s) and, in 1992, was the first organization to release a statistical ...