Many generations of students at the College of the Redwoods have used and contributed to the development of the current version of this highly versatile, menu-driven, easy to learn and use data analysis program known as DAP99 (Data Analysis Program). Its author began its development in the late 1970s. During its evolution, versions have been developed for the College's various mainframe computers and for Apple computers and PCs.

The current version is a DOS-based executable file that requires 126 kilobytes of memory. The source code is in QuickBasic, Version 4.5. DAP99 consists of a main program and fourteen procedures. The five main procedures are called by the main program and, in turn, call the nine secondary procedures.

DAP99 accepts ordered pairs of data, the uncertainties associated with these ordered pairs, utilizes the least squares criterion to fit linear, power, exponential, logarithmic, and polynomial functions to these sets of data, and plots user- or auto-scaled, captioned, and labeled graphs. DAP99 also calculates the square of the Pearson correlation coefficient and the uncertainties in the regression constants associated with the linear, power, exponential, and logarithmic functions.

DAP99 includes an extensive editor and also provides for the saving of data to ASCII text files. Data saved to files can be accessed via DAP99's data entry menu.

DAP99 is a data analysis program rather than one which models or simulates a particular physical situation. Its utility is in making it possible for one to fit linear, power, exponential, logarithmic, or polynomial functions to a given data set. DAP99 calculates the values of the regression constants and determines, except for the polynomial case, the values of the uncertainties in the regression constants.

DAP99 should be of interest to students and teachers of introductory laboratory-based disciplines such as physics, chemistry, and engineering in which the acquisition and analysis of data plays a central role. It can be downloaded from this site, along with two ancillary files ... DAP.BAT and FASTDUMP.COM (a graphing utility program), and an accompanying User's Guide to DAP, or obtained from the author by writing to him at the following address.

Download the latest version of DAP

DAP.ZIP