SPSS

In 1968, the story of SPSS began not in a garage, but in academia. Norman H. Nie, a PhD candidate at Stanford, was frustrated by the existing tools for analyzing social science data. He partnered with fellow doctoral candidate Dale H. Bent and an MBA student, Hadlai "Tex" Hull, to build a better solution: the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, or SPSS. Their goal wasn't to build a company, but to create a tool for their own research needs. The software, initially created for mainframes and punch cards, quickly found an audience beyond Stanford. The turning point came when McGraw-Hill published the first user manual in 1970. Suddenly, demand surged from universities and researchers. This success created a problem; by 1971, the IRS flagged the operation as a business, jeopardizing the non-profit status of the University of Chicago, where Nie and Hull had relocated. In 1975, with no venture capital, they officially incorporated as SPSS Inc. The company thrived by making its software accessible, releasing a version for personal computers in 1984. The final chapter of its independence came in 2009. IBM, looking to bolster its analytics capabilities, announced it was acquiring SPSS for approximately $1.2 billion. The acquisition marked the end of an era for the company born out of academic necessity, integrating it into a technology giant.