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. Only a few miles east in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft had just released a beta version of what it then called the "Game SDK" and ulitmately released as "DirectX". The Game SDK promised to deliver high-performance graphics and input processing to Windows 95, and though it was designed for video games, I immediately recognized its value to the field of cognitive psychology - it would finally enable millisecond precision stimulus presentation and reaction time measurement on Windows. My advisor, Tony Greenwald, gave me the green light to create new experimentation tools for the lab, and within a year, we were collecting our 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/CEO, Millisecond Software

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