Minitab: a retrospective?

Minitab Statistical Software was developed in about 1972 by three folk who taught statistics at Penn State University. They were responding to the need that they saw in their teaching for a simple interactive tool to take the drudgery out of practical work. Much the same agenda that Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka had when they started development on R at The University of Auckland in the early nineties. I think that I first used Minitab in 1982, when I was looking around for something, anything, to enable environmental science students to stop worrying about doing calculations, which buttons to press on their calculators, or which columns of punched cards to put an X in to get the desired outputs. Minitab came as a breath of fresh air. At last we could structure sessions around what the students were really interested in as opposed to the technicalities of calculation, button pressing or card punching. Minitab has therefore, a good pedigree in relation to teaching statistics…