Leaping to a New Optimum in the Office Workspace

I listened once to an old professor talking about working out factorial ANOVA and multiple regression on paper, back in the day. He described a whole room full of papers, all in a particular order, every sum contributing to the next sum and if you got one number wrong the whole thing would be wrong and you'd have to start over. Adding machines made it go quicker, and when punch-card mainframes came they were, well, frustrating at times -- lots of graphic and emotional stories there! By the end of the nineties everybody had a computer on their desktop, mostly with a connection to the brand-new Internet. SAS, SPSS, and other statistical and data-management packages became crucial office workhorses, and don't forget Excel.