>>>I am one of those that "did it for life" , well for 45 years, anyway. I started on "mainframes" using SAS and SPSS before there were PC's. I moved to FOX in the middle 90's because the pay was good and it was a good way to collect data. I still used SPSS to analyze the data.
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>>No BMDP ? Nothing from "Numerical Recipes" first in FORTRAN, then in C, as basis for own code ?
>
>Yes, Fortran and the IMSL

Yupp, another heavyweight. Had interesting talks with their reps end of 80ies, coming from 68000 (and 80386) had created a data aquisition program with overlaid memory structures in Prospero Pascal and Numerical work done in Prospero Fortran based on the big red "Numerical Recipes".

Later when asked to consolidate under MS OS I brought in IMSL as alternative coming also with sources. All backend crunching frowned on FORTRAN and targeted C/C++. IMSL back then was FORTRAN (Lahey?) only, and even directly linkable to other sources was not enough.

So I shrugged, bought the red "Numerical Recipes" for C again, ported my stuff to Modula2 and my crunching enhancements to C. Fun times as dBase wars were hefty and barebone SQL for PC was something we coded ourselves on the side. from a dB3 compatible format bought in the meantime..