About Millisecond

Millisecond Headquarters, Seattle, Washington.

In the spring of 1995, I sat down at my PC, fired up Visual C++ 4.0, and began writing the first lines of code that would eventually become Inquisit. At the time, I was a graduate student at the University of Washington. Just a few miles east, Microsoft had just released a beta version of the "Game SDK", which promised to deliver high-performance graphics and input processing to Windows 95. Though the Game SDK was designed for video games, I immediately recognized its value to the field of psychology. Until this point, Windows was too slow to support tachistoscopic stimulus presentation, so most research was conducted with software written for DOS. The few software packages available at the time were difficult to use and limited in functionality. With the Game SDK, it was finally possible to build a tool that enabled all of those experiments we had been dreaming up. My advisor, Tony Greenwald, gave me the green light and purchased the development tools. A few months later, Microsoft released the first official version of the Game SDK as "DirectX". Within a year, our lab was collecting its first data with Inquisit. Upon completing my Ph.D. in 1997, I founded Millisecond Software and went on to develop Inquisit into a commercial product.

To my knowledge, Inquisit was the first experimentation engine to leverage DirectX on Windows. It was the first to incorporate speech recognition. More recently, Inquisit was first to bring experiments with millisecond precision timing to the web. I love to innovate, and given my training in science and 9 years of experience developing software at Microsoft, Millisecond provides the perfect opportunity for me to do so.  My hope is that Inquisit enables my customers to do the most innovative research in the field.

Sean Draine, Ph.D.,
Founder, Millisecond Software

Millisecond Software is located in Seattle, Washington. Click here for contact information.