You know John Sall as a co-founder of SAS and chief architect of JMP. You may also know him as an innovator, early Mac adopter, electric vehicle enthusiast, champion of environmental causes, and statistician.
What you may not know about him, however, is that he’s celebrating 50 years at SAS this month.
Sall started a Ph.D. program in the Economics department at North Carolina State University (NCSU) in 1973, but because that did not hold his main interest, he decided to drop out and look for work.
In January 1974, with (now) SAS CEO Jim Goodnight as his mentor, he started as a programmer for the SAS project in the Department of Statistics.
“I had just previously completed a lot of programming classes and taken lots of statistics, so I was ready for a job at the SAS Project,” Sall said. “I had done part-time work for a statistics professor helping with SAS jobs and got to know the people in that project. So, I looked for a job opportunity there, and that connected. It was a perfect fit for me.”
“Our small group moved out to start SAS Institute a couple years later and has grown into the very successful company we are today,” Sall said. (See a brief history of SAS here).
For many years, Sall led SAS Applications Development. “One big project I started was the portable version of SAS, Version 6, that re-engineered SAS into the C language, and allowed SAS to run on PCs,” he said.
In the late 1980s, Sall started the JMP project, which has now become our subsidiary company with its own success story. Learn more about JMP Then and Now.
If you want to hear about SAS’ history from Sall’s perspective, listen to his remarks from the SAS 40th Anniversary celebration.
Congrats, John, on 50 years at SAS!
Half-century. Wow! Congratulations John and thank you!
