Winsteps
Sunday, August 14, 2005
Winsteps capacity increasing
When we started on the PC-XT around 1983, our Rasch software had the capacity of 63 items and 254 persons. On a minicomputer, this increased to 225 items by 1500 people. Since then, the analyzable dataset size has steadily increased. In Winsteps 3.57, April 2005, the limit is 30,000+ items (as requested by DNA researchers) and 999,999 persons. But now two testing organizations have requested capacity of over 1 million persons. So the tested capacity of Winsteps 3.58, planned for later in August 2005, is 10 million persons. Analyzing those takes about 24 hours on a current PC . A testing organization has also requested that data files bigger than 4GB be processable. This should be actioned later in the year.
Ben Wright's 1980 Rasch program, BICAL, had a standard maximum capacity of 480 items by 480 persons - but it was circulated as source code, so each user recompiled it to their own requirements. Ben's own version had a capacity of at least 800 persons. The maximum possible, without rewriting the code, appears to have been 99,999 persons.
Ben Wright's 1980 Rasch program, BICAL, had a standard maximum capacity of 480 items by 480 persons - but it was circulated as source code, so each user recompiled it to their own requirements. Ben's own version had a capacity of at least 800 persons. The maximum possible, without rewriting the code, appears to have been 99,999 persons.
