ABSTRACT
W'hen Fisher, Gossett, Pearson, and their colleagues were laying the foundations for the method of statistical inference that dominated 20th-century psychology, they did not have the same technologies as we have today. In Karl Pearson's day, at the turn of the last century, "computers" were the people who sat in university basements conducting computations on hand-cranked calculators. Given the potentials for human error, calculations were often repeated until any two solutions matched. Indeed, some of the analyses we use today were specifically tailored to minimize the number of necessary calculations. It is ironic that we continue to use older methods developed in part to address computational issues that no longer concern us.
