Tales from before The Great Silicon Valley Replacement.
And one midwesterner’s remote experience of those tales:
Not included in the latter is that Bob Brown admitted me to his domain at the UoIA Lindquist Center for Measurement because I was willing to do work on the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences running on his HP-3000. What stuck in my mind about SPSS was the way it handled a mysterious category called “missing data”. That phrase planted a seed in my mind as, shall we say, “interesting”. That seed grew into an intuition about lossless compression as the key to forensic epistemology which, in the final analysis, is what is required to nuke the social pseudo-sciences with the ALIC (ALgorithmic Information Criterion for model selection – see Hume’s Guillotine at github).