What is SPSS 6?

Large organizations that depend on statistics — and that means most of them — have settled on a handful of vendors for heavy-duty statistics software. The Mac vendors in this elite set are SAS Institute and SPSS. Until recently, using SPSS’s offering was a hit strange — you had the sensation that the Mac was acting as a dumb terminal for its own CPU, with a command language rooted in the computing practices of the 1960s. With version 6.1, that’s changed, SPSS is a real Mac product now, even though you can still peek behind the curtains and see the command language running in its own window. Most statistical products for the Mac (Abacus Software’s StatView, DataDesk, and SAS's JMP are good examples) arrive as a single package. SPSS, in contrast, offers a base package and a long list of modules geared toward statistical specialties. If you purchase the modules separately, the entire set costs more than $2000; fortunately, SPSS offers discount bundles. As a result of this pricing policy, the full SPSS installation — which positively cries out to be on CD-ROM — ships in a huge array of separate boxes with their own disk packs and manuals,

My main complaint about SPSS — though it is the most complete statistical system available — is that all sorts of standard tests that you would expect to find in the base package appear in separately priced modules. The Advanced Statistics module, for example, includes nonlinear regression and logistic regression — tests that every other vendor offers as standard operating equipment. Similarly, two components that most vendors would put in the base package — factor analysis and discriminant analysis — are part of the Professional Statistics module.

I have no complaints, however, about the modules' performance, features, and documentation. Marisa J. Norusis has produced the clearest, most readable and example-packed manuals ever seen in the field of statistics. For each module, the documentation presents detailed sets of case studies that take you step-by-step through the module’s tests; other programs’ documentation frequently lists just the tests. The Categories, Tables, and Trends modules are the most complete Mac packages available for categorical analysis, cross-tab studies, and time-series analysis, respectively. Although the modular approach makes assembling a full range of tests an expensive proposition, because statistics professionals tend to work in specialized areas, the SPSS approach can be cost-effective. A forecaster buying the base product and the Trends module, for example, would have the best system available for time-series work at a reasonable price.

File size in SPSS appears limited only by virtual memory space; lest files containing several hundred thousand records presented no problem in any of the modules. Performance optimization for the Power Mac was thorough as well, with most standard tests executing three to six times faster on a 6100/60 than on a Quadra 800 running the 680X0 version, SPSS's size makes virtual memory a must on systems with 16MB of RAM or less. Computational performance takes only a slight hit under virtual memory, but screen handling becomes painfully slow. Be sure to tack an order for more RAM onto your SPSS purchase order.

The Last Word

SPSS is serious professional-statistics software, with the most-complete test suites, the best documentation — and the highest price.

Seiter, Charles. (February 1996). SPSS 6.1. Macworld. (pg. 82).

Download SPSS 6 for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II