Anthony James Barr

In 1962-63, Tony Barr, as a physics graduate student, wrote a general analysis of variance program and a multiple regression program to run on the IBM1410 computer. These programs were used by all the agricultural extension researchers in the southeastern states. Barr may have been the first programmer in North Carolina.

As an IBM employee, Barr worked at the Pentagon on the Formatted File System (FFS), an early database and report-writing system. Barr conceived the Statistical Analysis System (SAS), which would use a database architecture similar to the FFS used at the Pentagon. In April 1968, Tony Barr returned to NCSU to rewrite the ANOVA and Regression programs for new the IBM/360 computer. Barr implemented these programs and the basic SAS language.

In 1968, Tony Barr collaborated on integrating the regression program into SAS. Jim Goodnight joined the SAS Project and made a major contribution of the general linear model procedure. This procedure was the only program that could analyze many medical experiments. In 1970, the FDA dictated that statistics be used to prove the safety and efficacy of pharmaceuticals. A large market for SAS was generated.

The first widely distributed version of SAS was released in 1972. Joylane Service wrote the manual. Her mantra was to write for the lowest user: “The Phd will not respect your language, but they will be successful as well as all other users.”

John Sall joined SAS in 1973. His interests were econometrics and statistics and was a very prolific programmer.

Tony Barr started on the 1976 version of the SAS.
The goals were:
o Make it easily extendible with language and procedures.
o Use reentrant code so multiple jobs would run with only one copy of the program in memory.
o Initialize all allocated memory to zero. This eliminated a serious class of bugs that occurred unpredictably because of the state of memory left by the previous
program.
o Add report-writing ability with the new PUT statement.
o Read every file type and data type that was present on the IBM 360. This was very important to the Computer Performance Evaluation community.
o Introduced the FORMAT and INFORMAT concepts.
o Make treatment of missing values uniform and comprehensive.
o All procedures were written in PL/1 while the systems and language portions were written in machine language.

In 1976, Barr, Goodnight, Sall, and Helwig left NCSU to found the SAS Institute.