Shortly afterwards, I made the switch to a Mac, safe in the knowledge that there was a Macintosh version-Prism and I have been good friends ever since. Instead of spending hours calculating a test, you could select the data, choose your parameters, click a button, and voila! GraphPad was founded by Harvey Motulsky, a researcher who was looking to analyze his own data, and I think I speak for most of my peers when I say thank goodness he did!Īll those years ago, that first introduction to Prism 3 was on a Windows machine. Instead, I was introduced to a software program by the name of GraphPad Prism that not only produced great-looking graphs, but also incorporated a statistics package that was both powerful and, more importantly for me, easy to use. Luckily for me, I started my career in science in the 1990s, so things like logarithmic graph paper and slide rules were only mentioned by old-timers at the pub. If you wanted to graph something, you needed a ruler, a sharp pencil, and some Letraset for the labels, and that's without touching on having to use log scales and drawing curves by hand. There was no PubMed, and definitely no Papers, so searching the literature involved hours spent at a desk in the library poring over Index Medicus. Of course, back in those days, everything was harder. But in a perfect example of letting the silicon chip do the heavy lifting, programs were written that would calculate those for you. Back before the widespread use of computers in research, it was tough luck-you had better know how to calculate t tests or regressions. And just about anyone who has taken a stats course at university can tell you that calculating statistical significance is both hard and boring. Just about anyone who works in science knows that you can have all the data you like, but if you can't show statistically significant differences between groups, you haven't shown anything.
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