Saturday, September 15, 2012

How life really has gotten better for researchers

The first non-thesis project I worked on as an assistant professor used the 1 in 1000 Public Use Microdata Sample of the US Census.  My recollection is that the sample had about 63,000 observations; I had to spin a tape to read data into a big iron VMS machine using SAS, and it took about 10 hours to do so.  The year was 1990.

Yesterday, I read five year ACS household data into my Macbook Pro using Stata.  It is broken into four files with about 1.5 million observations each.  Each file took about 2 minutes to read. This is really, really nice.

  

3 comments:

Don Coffin said...

First empirical work I ever did in grad school (1972), I had to type the data onto punch cards, type the program instructions (Biomed was the stat program) and give the card deck to a student working in the computer center to feed into the main-frame card reader. He dropped the deck, which taught me to number the program cards with a magic marker...

Life is so much simpler today...

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