Our legacy products are:

• WebSurv, a high-end market research surveying application package for administering complex surveys on the World Wide Web.
• ABstat, a statistical and survey analysis program, considered part of WebSurv but also sold separately.
• The booklet, "In Search of the Wild Hypothesis - an Adventure in Statistics for Non-Statisticians" which provides an excellent introduction to the basic concepts of statistics.

Company background: AndersonBell started out back in 1981. Our first product was ABstat. This was back before the IBM PC came on the market. The IBM PC virtually wiped out overnight the 8-bit micro market (how many of you have even heard of the defacto operating system of the time: CP/M?). As CP/M turned to DOS, ABstat evolved into a larger but still basic stat package for micro-computers.

The company incorporated in 1985 and is now a closely held corporation owned by Ed Anderson, one of its two original founders.

Over the next few years, a specialized version of ABstat was developed for doing surveys. It was called ABsurv, but its features were soon incorporated back into ABstat.

As DOS started turning into Windows, ABstat followed suit. The first version for Windows was called WinSTAR. But everybody and his brother wanted the name WinSTAR or a close sound-alike (does it remind you of a vehicle, or perhaps a jewelry store, or maybe a time-sheet program?). So the name was dropped and replaced with, you guessed it, "ABstat for Windows".

Well, with the early 90's came the realization that 200+ stat packages probably couldn't all thrive, especially since most of the market was being taken over by the big-3. But ABstat was a good product and deserved to survive so we started some development in slightly new directions.

Working closely with a local market research firm, we used ABstat as the basis for a CATI (Computer Aided Telephone Interviewing) system we called TelSurv, a product used by that local firm but never released to the public. That expanded ABstat's capabilities from working with paper surveys to doing data input from telephone or other interviewing situations.

That was a good start but inevitably, 1996 rolled around. And with it the realization that just as businesses woke up a few years earlier and discovered they couldn't do business without a fax machine, it became obvious that companies would soon wake up again and discover they couldn't survive without the Internet. So we decided it was time to look at the future of computing: the World Wide Web.

That lead directly to WebSurv. It's really TelSurv revisited for the Web. All the neat things that could be done with TelSurv over the phone can be done on the Web. Skip patterns, random rotation of questions and answer choices; it's all there. And it's still a viable high-end market research survey system for the Web.

We do sell WebSurv to clients who wish to run it on their own servers and used to use it internally to administer surveys for others who would rather not go to the trouble of operating their own servers. But we no longer host surveys. Our primary user is CogNETive Pty Ltd in Australia.

The world continues to change. ABstat is not compatible with Windows Vista or Windows 7 and that has forced us to re-evaluate our future. We're considering some new products in some new directions. Time marches on.