Around 1999, I started playing with R (prompted by a suggestion from Rod Ball), but I didn’t really use R/S+ often enough until 2003. I was still using SAS for data preparation, but all my analyses went through ASReml (for which I wrote the cookbook), which was orders of magnitude faster than SAS (and could deal with much bigger problems). At the end of 1996 (or was it the beginning of 1997) I started playing with ASReml (programed by Arthur Gilmour mostly based on theoretical work by Robin Thompson and Brian Cullis). At that time (1995-1996) I moved to DFREML (by Karen Meyer, now replaced by WOMBAT) and AIREML (by Dave Johnson, now defunct-I mean the program), which were designed for the analysis of animal breeding progeny trials, so it was a hassle to deal with experimental design features. A brief history of timeĪt the beginning (1992-1995) I would use SAS (first proc glm, later proc mixed), but things started getting painfully slow and limiting if one wanted to move into animal model BLUP. The bulk of my use of mixed models relates to the analysis of experiments that have a genetic structure. A substantial part of my job has little to do with statistics nevertheless, a large proportion of the statistical side of things relates to applications of linear mixed models.
