Campus Computing News

By Dr. Philip Baczewski, Associate Director of Academic Computing

Dr. Baczewski is filling in as guest columnist for Dr. Leatherbury this month. -- Ed,

SPSS Y2K Issues on the Academic Mainframe

Academic Computing Services and the Computing Center cannot guarantee, at this time, that a fully functional version of the SPSS statistical analysis software will be available on the Academic IBM Mainframe after December 31, 1999. SPSS, Inc. has promised us a patch to the MVS batch version of SPSS which is supposed to address Y2K issues, however, the patch which was promised for September has yet to be released. We are not dropping support for SPSS on MVS, however, without the promised patch from SPSS Inc., it is doubtful that SPSS will remain fully functional on the Mainframe MVS batch system.

We strongly recommend that any data stored in SPSS system file format be converted to portable format before the end of December. Please note that source data or program files will be usable with minor changes on other platforms such as Macintosh, Windows, or UNIX. Information about converting system files to a portable format can be found in the recent Benchmarks Online column, "RSS Matters": http://www.unt.edu/benchmarks/archives/1999/october99/rss.htm

We have some good news for those who did not manage to convert their SPSS CMS system file format data sets before the product expired at the end of September. SPSS Inc. has made it clear that they will not patch the CMS version in order to make it Y2K compliant which caused us to drop that version from our offerings this fiscal year. We have negotiated and received an extension to our SPSS/CMS license which will run through November 30, 1999. This will allow a last and final chance to convert CMS SPSS system files to a portable format. Please visit http://www.unt.edu/rss/software/spsscms.htm for more information in this regard.

If you require assistance with any of the operations recommended above, please contact the ACS Research and Statistical Support office at X. 2140 or X. 4166.