The original Instat from the start

The original Instat was written by statisticians engaged in teaching, research and consultation, in collaboration with programmers. It began in 1983 as a series of programs for the BBC Microcomputer for teaching statistics, written by Bob Burn.  He later worked as a Principal Statistician for the SSC, Statistical Services Centre following many years working as a consultant in Mauritius.

Instat was first used on a training course of statistics in agriculture given in Sri Lanka at the end of 1983. It was then further developed and marketed from mid-1985.  In 1987 Instat became available commercially for the PC compatible range of machines. The first shareware version (V6.1) was released in 1994, V6.2 released in September 1996 contained many new general features, while V6.5 had new chapters for the Instat Climatic Guide and new commands to model rainfall data.

Instat was used in the UK and abroad by a wide range of companies, research institutes, schools, colleges, universities, and by private individuals working at home. It has been used in many courses on general statistics and on statistics in agriculture, health and climatology courses.  These were in Reading, Sri Lanka, Africa, China and elsewhere.

During this period, development of the package continued in collaboration with staff from the University of Reading under the guidance of Roger Stern, who returned to work at Reading, after seven years at ICRISAT in Niger in the 1990s. During Roger's absence, Joan Knock ran the Instat office at Reading.

Instat in Windows

The first test release of Instat for Windows was in 2000, to be tested and then used on 10 week training courses in Nairobi in May 2000 and Reading in July 2000. The first public trial version was released in October 2000, with further releases in Summer 2001 and September 2002.  These versions were produced by Roger Stern, Colin Grayer, Ian Dale and Joan Knock, all then staff at the Statistical Services Centre, the University of Reading. Funding for the first release under Windows was provided by the UK Met. Office at Bracknell and the Statistical Services Centre. The Statistical Services Centre funded the development of the 2002 release.

Early versions of Instat were totally in BBCBASIC(86), with some sections in Assembler - thanks to Richard Russell (who was primarily responsible for BBCBASIC on the PC). The Windows version added a front end, written in Visual Basic.  Since 2003 successive versions of  Instat were in Windows, using versions of BBCBasic for Windows (http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/index.html ) for the Instat server, with the front end remaining in Visual Basic.  For the past 10 years the main users of Instat have been those who wished to analyse climatic data.  This is particularly for events such as the start of the rains, risks of dry spells, and so on.  

We bow to the inevitable in moving Instat from BBCBasic to R, but those who remember the BBC microcomputer and its BBC Basic language will appreciate the nostalgia that some of us feel, particularly as BBC Basic continues to be available!

The case for R-Instat

The initial case for R-Instat was made in our crowd-sourcing campaign in mid 2015. The link to the campaign site is here.  It starts with with 3.5 minute video.

 

 

The first stage in the campaign worked.  We have been developing the software and you are using a beta version.  The development has been an excellent partnership with the work largely being done in Kenya through AMI (African Maths Initiative), plus in Reading at the SSC (Statistical Services Centre - now closed), hence also with Stats4SD (Statistics for Sustainable Development). It really is software developed largely in Africa, and for Africa, and useful more widely.

R-Instat is basically an easy-to-use front-end to R.  It is designed to be as easy as any statistics package can be. So it can be a first statistics package for those who are reasonably comfortable with a spreadsheet.  It can be used by anyone, but its main target audiences are in the section titled "Who is R-Instat for?"

Usually realism sets in once the programming starts. The development has certainly taken longer than we expected.  That is partly because the high quality and variety of R packages has been just astounding and hence we have become steadily more excited by what is possible.  The phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants" is appropriate. The vision, dedication and quality of work of the group who started R and now those who continue to add packages is incredible.  

R-Instat is designed to broaden the audience who are able to enjoy using R and also to provide an environment that can prompt improvements in the teaching and application of both statistics and data science.

Tell us what you think on: r-instat@africanmathsinitiative.net.  If you have a specific software suggestion then use our github page.  .