Back in the old days, when researchers specified questionnaire length in card and people wanted column binary files, survey research data processing equaled tabulation. This work was first outsourced. As technology grew less costly, companies began to bring it in-house to be done by a group of people often called spec writers. These people were typically neither researchers nor programmers by education or experience. Instead, they were specialists trained in the often-arcane software packages and analytic conventions of market research. They had almost no interaction with people involved data collection, taking their instructions instead from project managers and analysts.