Stanley Cohen, president of Pulse Analytics, Inc. since 1979, has worked in market research, statistics and computers for 23 years. Cohen has also worked for IBM, IT&T and Benton and Bowles Advertising Agency. He received his masters in mathematics from Yeshiva University, New York, and studied operations research at New York University. Additionally, Cohen has published many articles on marketing research statistics and is an early pioneer of multi-variate analysis to marketing research problems.

Your data is ready. After weeks of planning the research strategy, fulfilling the sample quotas, collecting the  questionnaires, editing and coding the items, and finally deciding on the analytical approaches that are to be taken, you are ready to "start" to work.

You lapse into a momentary reverie and remember how it used to be. You had to coordinate the individual tasks of tabulation of data, statistical analysis, graphic presentations, and report preparation among a variety of service facilities where skills and resources were concentrated among a limited number of specialists. The specter of a scratched-over project flow charts and time-tables arises, covered by a veil of deadline extensions, bridging gaps of unforeseen bottlenecks that have eaten up the conservatively planned slack, and have forced you into frenzied overtime that will ensure that the final report will be issued fresh and forthcoming on the scheduled due date.

All that is changed now. Your PC computer, compatible and charged up with all the options and features that you need is at your service. You have all the memory (RAM that is) you can get, you have a generously endowed hard disk (more than 10 megabytes), a dot matrix and/or laser printer; a graphics monitor; even a math-coprocessor; and finally a modem that breaks the isolation of your office out into the world of data communication. The specialists are a figment of the past. Care...