wrote on 27. April 2018 at 13:52:
I started at SPSS in March 1982. In 1984 Bill Arendt showed me an IBM PC sitting in his office. He explained tome that the PC might just be a passing fad, but that we were going to port our mainframe software onto the PC since there seemed to be at least a short-term market for it. I became part of the early SPSS/PC team: Bill Arendt, Jean Jenkins, Kim Peck, ViAnn Beadle, and myself. We had to make SPPS/PC all fit onto PC's with 384K of memory, which required lots of adjustments. We quickly had a PC product. There were just two original IBM PC's at SPSS, one of which was named "Merry". I forget the name of the other. I think ViAnn had named them. Each machine had only floppy drives, and each PC had an external hard drive in a separate box the same size as the original IBM PC, that was either 5 or 10 megabytes. We stored the object files on that hard drive, from which we linked the final release. The hard drive only had room for about 80% of the object files, so we had to swap in floppies during the build process to pick up the remaining object files. There were about 6 separate "modules" to build, and each took about 40 minutes to link. I recall staying one night before a release and sleeping under the desk, waking up every 40 minutes or so to change floppies so the build would finish before morning.