User:COIDave/John Sall

John Sall (b. 1948) is a businessman and computer software developer best known for his work with SAS Institute and JMP. Sall co-founded SAS Institute, created the JMP division of SAS and JMP analytics software.

Sall grew up in Rockford, Illinois, attended school in Wisconsin, Illinois, and then in North Carolina. A professor at North Carolina State University, Jim Goodnight, became his business partner with two others in founding SAS Institute. Sall developed the first JMP product in the 1980s and continues supporting its development up until the present.

Sall is involved in philanthropic, community, academic and analytic organizations. He’s a developer responsible for many of SAS Institute’s first procedures and for the JMP software product. Today he is an Executive Vice President of SAS Institute and the chief architect of JMP.

Youth & academics
John Sall was born in Rockford, Illinois, in 1948. He received a Bachelor of Arts in history from Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin. Sall graduated into a weak job market, so he went to graduate school at Northern Illinois University, where he earned a master’s degree in economics. He became captivated by statistics and computer science, and studied graduate–level statistics at North Carolina State University. He received an honorary doctorate from NC State University in 2003.

Starting SAS
John Sall met Jim Goodnight as a graduate student at North Carolina State University. Goodnight was Sall’s mentor. In 1976, Sall joined Anthony James Barr, Goodnight, and Jane Helwig in founding SAS Institute Inc. John owns about one-third of the company, while Goodnight owns the remainder.

Sall designed, developed, and documented many of the earliest procedures of the SAS language. The SAS product has continually been rewritten for emerging environments like CMS, minicomputers, bitmap workstations, personal computers, Windows, client-server and now for cloud computing.

JMP & Today
John Sall became interested in the graphic visualization of data in the 1980s, when some of the first graphical user interfaces were created on the Macintosh. Sall started working on JMP in 1989. He developed JMP with a small team for a year and a half before version one was released. Sall has continued coding and doing product development for the JMP product for more than 20 years, supporting Windows 3.1, writing the product in different implementation languages, re-writing the product’s “nervous system” and improving the JMP scripting language. Today Sall still acts as JMP's chief architect. He’s also co-authored the book “JMP Start Statistics.”

Personal
John Sall lives in Cary, North Carolina. He is married and has four children. Sall and his wife have an interest in conservation, international health and development, and environmental issues. Sall was on the board of The Nature Conservancy from 2002 to 2011. Sall and his wife also work with the WWF for a living planet, CARE and other non-profits. They contributed to the founding of Cary Academy, an independent college preparatory school for students grades six through 12. Sall was elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1998 and is also a member of the North Carolina State University Board of Trustees. In 1994, he served as Chairman of the Interface Foundation of North America.

Sall’s net worth is approximately $3.7 billion. He is the 76th richest person in the United States. Most of John’s net value is illiquid and based on the estimated worth of his partial ownership in SAS Institute. John still works, does programming, leads a team of developers and leads a modest lifestyle.