Software Reviews : AIDA (Apple Interactive Data Analysis)Publisher: Action-Research Northwest,11442 Marine View Drive,sw,Seattle WA 98146 (telephone: [phone]) Year of Publication: August 1984 Materials: 3 diskettes (2 copies of boot master,1 program disk),documentation volume,all contained in vinyl binder Price: [not given to reviewer] Machine Specificity: 48,64 or 128K Apple II,IIc or IIe (also Apple III in II emulation mode),one or more drives—at least two are recommended System Requirements: No special requirements Effectiveness: Excellent User-Friendliness: Good Documentation: Excellent

Abstract

AIDA is a statistics package designed for use by owners of the Apple II family desk-top computer. The program performs a standard set of descriptive statistics, some bivariate measures of statistical inference, and multiple linear regression. With at least 64K, the program can handle about 16,500 data points in memory.

Social scientists who are Apple users and wish to perform statistical analysis on their desktops have long been at a comparative disadvantage relative to colleagues with IBM or IBM-compatible hardware. While numerous relatively sophisticated packages are available for the latter type system, Apple users have had little choice in terms of available software. As far as this reviewer is aware, the most comprehensive statistics package available for the Apple has been DAISY which, while easy to use and fairly powerful (up to stepwise multiple regression), is quite limited in the number of data points it can handle (maximum about 2800). AIDA is capable of handling larger data sets (over 16,000 cells in cases of 64K or more memory).