Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Stata at 20: A Personal View

2005; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 5; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/1536867x0500500109

1536-8734

Patrick Royston,

Probability and Statistical Research

I still have my 1989 shipment of Biturbo Stata version 2.05 and Stage 1.0 Graphics Editor, on five 3.5-inch, 720 Kb floppies. On opening at random my copy of the version 2.05 reference manual (copyright March 1989 c © Computing Resource Center, Los Angeles, California), the page fell open at page 539, a summary of something called Stat.Kit. I recalled then the excitement of the arrival of “kits”; they were the forerunners of the now familiar and quintessential ado-files. In those days, there were 4 such kits (Stat.Kit, Graph.Kit, Data.Kit, Survive.Kit), and they provided a variety of programs in each relevant area. You typed, for example, run Stat.Kit, and the associated 17 programs were loaded into memory. After that you used them exactly as one now does an ado-file.