SAS

SAS (pronounced “sass”) is the name of one of the world's largest software development corporations. Originally an acronym for “statistical analysis software,” SAS was created by Jim Goodnight, John Sail, and other researchers at North Carolina State University in the early 1970s. What began as a locally developed set of programs for agricultural research quickly became so popular that in 1976 the SAS Institute was formed in Raleigh, North Carolina, to meet the growing demand. The company immediately formed an alliance with IBM and created the first SAS Users Group International (SUGI), which continues to provide assistance to SAS users, distribute newsletters, maintain a popular Web site and hold conferences throughout the world.

Within 5 years, SAS outgrew its original site and moved to its current campus in Cary, North Carolina. By this time, it was installed in thousands of sites around the world. Within 10 years, not only was SAS installed on 65% of all mainframe sites, but partnerships had been established with Microsoft and Apple as the personal computer revolution began. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, SAS has been the recipient of many prestigious awards for its technical accomplishments. Annual revenues in 1976 were $138,000; by 2006 they were $1.9 billion.

The features of SAS software cover a large family of products with applications in the government, academic, and private sectors. The characteristics most used by survey research professionals are common to most data analysis software, although the implementation can be very different from one software package to another. First, SAS has the ability to read electronically stored data in almost any format from almost any medium. Second, it has an enormous array of data transformation options with which to recode existing variables and create new ones. Third, SAS has an unlimited number of data analysis procedures from commonly used procedures to the most exotic [Page 797]analysis and the capability of creating user-developed applications that can be implemented from within existing SAS applications. Fourth, output can be in tabular or graphical form. Finally, SAS has a full-featured macro language with which to control data processing and output.