CRSP's tapes soon joined by other data sources, notably the "Compustat" tapes of accounting data sold by Standard & Poor's-gave U.S. finance academics from the mid 1960s an advantage over their predecessors: easy access to massive volumes of data in a format that facilitated analysis. Even at the start of the 1960s, researchers such as the Chicago Ph.D. student Arnold B. Moore were still having to construct stock-price series by hand from runs of the Wall Street journal (Moore 1962, p. 47). Once the CRSP tapes became available, that tedious effort was no longer needed.

Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, loc. 309