This story gives people false hopes. I use SPSS 6.1.1 for PPC on a dayly basis. I ran it under MacOS 7.5, 7.6, 8.0 and 8.1 . I also used SPSS for 68k machines (6.1.2). I get the impression this later version is somewhat more stable, except for a few small bugs. However, it can of course only be run on 68k machines. I agree fully with David Collins, version 4 is the best, and most stable version of SPSS. It's a bad thing that they abolished the command editor in version 6.1.1 and the plain ASCII output in version 4 is great. However, there is one problem with version 4, it's slow because it's only 68k code, not PPC native code. With the 6.1.1 PPC version I encountered a lot of crashes. Most of them I encountered when running the earlier versions of the MacOS. Certain crashes and system lockups are consistant over various platforms. Try for example opening a large datafile (1000 variables & 2000 cases) and pull down Scatter plots from the menu bar. Do this a second time and you will encounter XVT errors. SPSS wil stop operating and you will not be able to open it again before you have restarted you're computer. I have done everything to work around the bugs (including the tips SPSS gave to me). The only conclusion of this all must be that SPSS should issue some patches to repair the worst of it. Or port version 4 to PPC native code. Anyway I hope SPSS learnes something from the need which there exists in the scientific world for a good SPSS version for the Mac.

Marcel Dijkstra Junior Statician Neuropsychology & Psychobiology University of Maastricht, The Netherlands