SURVO66 operation emulates the behaviour of the first Survo software
SURVO 66 programmed for the Elliott 803 computer in 1965-1966 by Seppo
Mustonen and a team of students in the Tampere University.
Usage: SURVO66 (data as a text file)
(title)
...
... (program code)
...
END@
The results are saved in file SURVO66.TXT on the current Survo datapath.
The following operations of the original SURVO 66 system are inluded:
M, N, COMMENT, DEF, ADD, SUB, MULT, DIV, MOD, SQRT, EXP, LOG, MAX, MIN,
EQUAL, LESS, LESSEQ, BETWEEN, OR, AND, NOT,
MEAN, CORREL, REGRAN, TABLE.
Information about the original SURVO 66:
Paper by Alanko,Mustonen, and Tienari (1968)
User Guide by Mustonen (1966 in Finnish)
The computing centre of the Finnish Cable Works (predecessor of Nokia)
was established in the beginning of 1960ies. My task there was to create
statistical programs for the Elliott 803 computer.
At first, the main emphasis was on methods like multiple linear
regression and factor analysis that were computationally very hard to
apply without an electronic computer.
Making of simple statistical summaries like computing means and standard
deviations or creating cross tabulations on a computer was not so
temptating especially when the data values had to be
punched on a paper tape and computer time availabe was limited.
This situation led us to think about a sort of 'parallel processing' by
combining several tasks so that during one input of the data tape
all 'sufficient statistics' needed for various tasks were collected
simultaneously. This approach made also minor statistical tasks
feasible.
Then it was essential to create a tiny 'programming language' for
describing multiple statistical tasks and make an interpreter for that
language and several program modules for carrying out statistical tasks.
This goal was achieved by the "Statistical programming language
SURVO 66" implemented in 1966-67.
The key features of SURVO 66 are now recreated as a SURVO MM operation
SURVO66. Making of SURVO66 is a tribute for my coworkers in the
Oy Nokia Ab, Electronics Division and the University of Tampere:
Martti Tienari, Timo Alanko, Leena Lankinen, Tatu Kalin, Matti Ylinen,
Pentti Kanerva, and Kari Kärkkäinen.
Due to the efficiency of modern computers the idea of of SURVO 66
has become obsolete for the most part. However, making a great many
cross tabulations from the same large data set is much faster
by the TABLE command of SURVO66 than by the TAB command of SURVO MM.
Demos of SURVO66:
Demo 106: Resurrection of SURVO 66
Demo 107: Cross tabulations with SURVO 66
E = more information on the Survo Editor
Help System (web edition)