Dr. John Sall

Born in Rockford, Illinois), he is an American software developer and businessman. He is a partial owner of SAS Institute. (he currently owns about 1/3 of the company, while James Goodnight owns the other 2/3.) He received a Bachelor of Arts in history from Beloit College and a master's degree in economics from Northern Illinois University. He met business partner James Goodnight as a graduate student at North Carolina State University. He received an honorary doctorate from NC State in 2003 and is a member of the NC State University Board of Trustees. In 1973, he joined the SAS project that was currently in progress having been conceived by Anthony J. Barr in 1966, making extensive programming contributions in econometrics, time series, and matrix algebra. Other participants in the early years included Caroll G. Perkins, Jolayne W. Service, and Jane T. Helwig. Perkins made programming contributions. Service and Helwig created the early documentation. In 1976, he joined Anthony James Barr, Goodnight, and Jane Helwig in founding SAS Institute Inc., now believed to be the largest privately held software maker in the world. SAS's main and original product was the SAS software package used in statistical analysis, consisting of numerous modules which ran on IBM mainframe computers. In addition to the usual mainframe practice of writing and submitting programs in batch, SAS offered the option, somewhat novel at the time, of a windowed programming environment, where the program being written or edited appeared in one window, the program output appeared in another window, and the program log appeared in a third window.