IDEAlog 9.0 accompanies the ninth edition of The Challenge of Democracy: Government in America, a college textbook written by Kenneth Janda, Jeffrey Berry, and Jerry Goldman (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008).
The original version of the IDEAlog program was released in 1989. It was inspired by The World's Smallest Political Quiz, a computer program that explained the libertarian political philosophy. We thank Marshall Fritz and the Advocates for Self-Government for ideas and assistance in developing IDEAlog.
IDEAlog was written originally for personal computers by Dennis Hartman. David Andrew and Andrew Kalai revised IDEAlog to accept new data. In 1992, the PC version of IDEAlog won the Computer Software Award, Instructional Category, of the Computers and Multimedia Section of the American Political Science Association.
The Internet application of IDEAlog was created in 2001 by Mythryn, LLC, of Chicago, Illinois. It won the 2005 Computer Software Award of the APSA.
IDEAlog 9.0, which is a complete rewrite of the previous version, was developed by Mark Begale and Andrew Suprenant.