I'm posting this live from the Midwest SAS User's Group (MWSUG) in downtown Cleveland, Ohio. Attendees are eating dinner, and we're about to hear John Sall, Executive Vice President of SAS, talk about the history of the company he co-founded along with Jim Goodnight, Tony Barr and Jen Helwig in 1976. Following John's walk down memory lane, we'll be hearing from Suzanne Gordon, SAS CIO, during the Opening Ceremony. Suzanne is slated to talk about prospering in a down economy.
John starts out talking about Gertrude Cox, who came from Iowa State to Raleigh and founded the statistics departments at NC State, UNC and Research Triangle Institute.
The presentation is accompanied by a lot of great, grainy photos of the early days.
John says one of the first computers at NC State was an IBM 1410. Jim Barr was hired as an intern in the statistics department to program the 1410. Jim Goodnight, an Assistant Professor at NC State, and Jim Barr created the program SAS in the late 60s.
John Sall joined the department in 1974 and Jane Helwig joined a year later to help do documentation. In 1976, SAS turned from a project inside the statistics department to a private company. "We were just a group of six," says John. "It started out very small."
Of course, this was before venture funding was common around universities. Now NC State has Centennial Campus, and it's part of the university's mission to spin off companies. That was not the case in 1976, so they did everything on their own.
Jim was good at marketing, says John, while showing a picture of Jim on the phone with a few papers scattered around his desk. "Jim Goodnight is known as a clean desk person," explains John. "This is probably the messiest his desk has ever been."
Next, John shows an old photo of himself at a desk, "... thinking about making some phone calls." At the time, John was teaching short courses on SAS, and he says he was not as good at marketing.
"Have you heard the M&M story?" asks John. The SAS M&M story starts with Marti Dominick going to the office supply store with a check for the exact amount she was planning to spend on supplies. When the supplies were totaled up, there was a discount somewhere, and her check was made out for more than the total. Unable to receive change for the check, she grabbed a few bags of M&Ms at the checkout counter and took them back to the office, where she placed them in paper cups and shared them with her coworkers.
The next week, she went to the office supply store with a check for the correct amount. When she came back with just the office supplies, everyone asked, "Where's the M&Ms?"
So it became tradition to purchase M&Ms every Wednesday along with the office supplies. SAS is now the largest corporate consumer of M&Ms in the world.
"Lots of good things happen from small beginnings," says John. "Back when we started out, SAS was 150,000 lines of code. Now it's many millions."
Next, John shows an early SAS users group paper that detailed how to use statistics to predict the winner of the Miss America pageant. "This was like a decision tree," says John. Contestants were thrown out one-by-one based on past predictors, including height, talents and home state. The press picked up the story, and this was the first time SAS was covered in the national press.
"After that, Jim Goodnight started doing press interviews, and we'd read the articles and learn things," says John. In one interview, he coined the term multi-vendor architecture, and SAS spent years working on this area.
"When we started, SAS was just on the mainframe. Now it's on all kinds of devices. We're even doing iphone apps, flash apps and others. We started out as a small company and grew to become the giant company you know."
Last week SAS held a 20th birthday party for JMP, the division John leads. In closing, he says, "We appreciate all the support from users in the past, and we will serve you well in the future."
