Software Reviews : 1St-Class Staff review Publisher: Programs in Motion,10 Sycamore Road,Wayland,MA 01778 (telephone: [phone]) Year of Publication: 1985 Materials: Unlocked program disk;127-page manual in 3-ring binder;slipcase Price: $495 ($100 to educational institutions in lots of 10 or more),including Runtime Program and distribution license,allowing unlimited distribution of an expert system developed by the user (not distribution of 1ST-CLASS itself);$50 for limited-scope version allowing 5 factors,6 values,10 examples,with price applicable to full system;10% educational discount when requested by an educational institution;multiple copy sales to a single educational unit discounted by arrangement. Machine Specificity: IBM PC and compatibles System Requirements: 256K memory Effectiveness: Excellent User-Friendliness: Good Documentation: Good

Abstract

If social scientists understood the potential usefulness of this package in teaching and research, 1ST-CLASS would quickly become a common feature of methods courses throughout the country. This is an expert systems generator that can work inductively as well as deductively, as contrasted with some of the rule-based systems. It can be used with nominal, ordinal, and interval data to induce from examples the underlying rule structure with respect to a dependent variable. As such it is an amazingly powerful tool for the exploratory stages of research.