Great stuff Barry. Brings back memories of the IBM world in the seventies. Tony Barr went on to found Barr Systems. Mr. Barr's history of SAS is here:
http://www.barrsystems.com/about_us/the_company/sas_history.asp Mike Shaw MVS/QuickRef Support Group Chicago-Soft, Ltd. On Sun, Oct 9, 2022 at 12:26 PM Barry Merrill <[email protected]> wrote: > Fifty years ago today, October 9, 1972, I ran my first SAS Program. > > > I left the Navy in June, 1972, and in August, my Psychologist friend, > Dr. L. Rogers Taylor, now working at State Farm Automobile HQ in > Bloomington, IL, suggested I might find a home there and arranged for > an interview. At Purdue in 1966, I had written FORTRAN programs for > his dissertation, using pattern recognition techniques, cluster > analysis, and vector distance tools from my Master's Research in EE at > LARS, the Laboratory for Agricultural Remote Sensing. These tools had > not been previously used in his then-new field of Industrial > Psychology. His actual application analyzed questionnaires completed by > Humble Oil Petroleum Engineers, which were then correlated with a > separate data file that identified those Engineers who HAD found oil > from those that hadn't, to construct a predictive questionnaire (very > successfully, he received accolades from his peers for introducing > pattern recognition to them). He arranged for an interview with the > Vice President for Data Processing, Dr. Norman Vincent. > > After completing the required HR forms, my escort very nervously drove > me to the Corporate HQ Building; he had never even MET a State Farm > Corporate VP, let alone be in a VP's office! I immediately clicked > with Norm and met the manager of the brand new "Measurement Unit", > Dave Vitek, and then spent the day interviewing members of that group > (and being interviewed/evaluated by them). I started Sept 18, 1972 > at $13800. > > In 1972, the state of the art for IBM mainframe computer capacity > planning was simple: your company's IBM salesman would visit with your > company's vice president for data processing, hand him the contract > for a newer and faster and larger computer for only a few million > dollars. Dave Vitek had attended (the first?) Boole and Babbage User > Group (BBUG) annual meeting, where the idea of actually measuring the > computer system utilization was THE topic. Dave decided that rather > than just trusting the IBM salesman as your capacity planner, State > Farm should be able to figure out how measure its own computers, and > Dave got Norm to fund a ten-person Measurement Unit for three years > for a feasibility study. > > Steve Cullen had drafted an excellent attack plan to investigate the > four possible tools, SMF Accounting, Software Monitors, Hardware > Monitors, and Simulation, and in short order, we had Kommand/PACES for > accounting, Software Monitors (SYSTEM LEAP and PROGRAM LEAP), Hardware > Monitors (TESDATA XRAY), and Simulation (SAM). But, Kommand was only > for billing, with only a few canned reports, and with no tool for data > extraction, Denny Maguire had started to write PL/1 programs to > extract fields directly from the raw SMF records. When he mentioned he > wanted to plot his data. I called Purdue's LARS and they sent me the > FORTRAN "PLOT" subroutine that I had written there that did simple > plots on line printers, but could also print detailed graphics on > CalComp paper plotters. Denny was still having problems reading the > complex data in SMF records, so my PLOT program was still untested, > when, in the September, 1972, Datamation, I found this announcement: > "The Institute of Statistics at North Carolina State University > announces the availability of the Statistical Analysis System, a > package of 100,000 lines, one third each in Fortran, PL/1 and > Assembler, that does printing, analysis and plotting of data. The > package is available, including source code, for $100.00." > > I wrote for information, and got typical university documentation, > with some pages dittoed, some pages typed, some printed, each on paper > of a different color, but I immediately realized the power and > simplicity and the beauty of the SAS language and especially of power > of its INPUT statement which could clearly handle the complexity of > SMF data. However, in their list of supported data field formats, > there was no reference to support for Packed Decimal fields. You only > need to get seven bytes into an SMF record to encounter a Packed > Decimal field, so I called the Institute of Statistics at North > Carolina State University, and was connected with Tony Barr, the > designer of the SAS language and the author of the SAS compiler about > support for that data type. In his North Carolina accent, he replied, > "Wheall, we haven't got around to documenting it yet, but if you type > in P D 4 Point, it'll work jest fine", so I convinced State Farm to > risk the 1972 purchase price of $100 for the SAS package. > > Starting in 1964, Tony Barr and Dr. Jim Goodnight had collaborated to > develop an ANOVA routine for the Department of Agriculture. Tony had > been an IBM developer of the data base for the cold war's Distant > Early Warning (DEW line) radar system, and Jim was a well-known > statistician. Both recognized the weakness of the existing stat > packages: they were only subroutines that had to be invoked by other > programs that had to prepare and manage the data to be analyzed. By > creating a language, a database, and the statistics, the Statistical > Analysis System expanded well beyond the original ANOVA routine and > had been tested at several Agricultural Experimental Stations and > other universities, but the 1972 announcement was the first public > release of the Statistical Analysis System, and in October, 1972, > State Farm was the FIRST real customer to install the SAS package from > NCSU's Statistics Department. > > Within days of receipt of SAS, I was extracting CPU time and PROGRAM > name and Core-Hours to produce reports on resource consumption direct > from SMF records. When the CPU time recorded in the Kommand billing > records was found to be many hours less than the CPU time that my SAS > program found reading SMF directly, we discovered that Kommand times > were truncated (because COBOL fixed length fields were used), but > because SAS stores all numerics as floating point numbers, SAS > effectively had eliminated the exposure to truncation and to > un-initialization, the two most common causes of numerical errors in > computer programs! > > Over the next months, I made presentations on the use of SAS software > and began to discuss the design of the "PDB", the "Performance Data > Base", a daily repository of performance and capacity related datasets > created from SMF data. > > Presentations were given to the Bloomington and Chicago chapters of > the ACM and DPMA; the SAS data base was mentioned in my paper (on the > use of the SAS data base to create simulation input for the System > Analysis Machine directly from actual SMF data) presented at the 1973 > SSCS (Symposium on the Simulation of Computer Systems) at the National > Bureau of Standards, and at a BOF (Birds of a Feather) informal > session at the Seventh Annual Interface Symposium at Iowa State. Many > XRAY hardware monitor users became aware of State Farm's PDB through > the Midwest TESDATA Users Group, which held its inaugural meeting in > 1973 at State Farm. These presentations were only half technical; I > also had to convince attendees that staffing of this new measurement > concept was cost justified by the real dollar savings. John Chapman > had used an XRAY at Standard Oil and invited me to join SHARE's > Computer Measurement and Evaluation (CME) project, and I described SAS > and the PDB in a closed session of the CME project at my first SHARE > meeting, SHARE 42 in Houston in March of 1974. The first open session > presentation on the use of the SAS System to process SMF data was at > the next SHARE 43 that August in Chicago before to an audience of over > 750 (half of the attendees!) > > That session was split with an IBM presentation on their new SGP, > Statistics Gathering Package, an FDP that selected a few fields from a > few SMF records. IBM spoke first, then I showed what we had done with > SAS at State Farm. One attendee stood and asked the IBM author of SGP, > Bill Tetzlaff, "Now that you have seen SAS, is there any reason why > you would still recommend your SGP product?" Several hundred SHARE > sites acquired SAS that fall as a result of this SHARE session! > > I developed my Doctoral Thesis while working at State Farm Insurance, > 1972-1976, proved it while at Sun Oil Company, 1976-1984, and in 1984, > at the urging of my wife, Judith, Vice President, left Sun Oil to > create Merrill Consultants (I write software and support it, she runs > the business). We commercialized my dissertation into our MXG Software > Product, which has been licensed by over 7000 corporations worldwide, > where it is used by senior technicians for the Measurement of the > Performance of the Large Scale commercial (IBM) mainframes, providing > response time, utilization, and bottleneck detection, for Capacity > Planning, for cost accounting of departmental resource usage, and for > security auditing of who's using what program, what files, etc. among > its many facilities, and is delivered in 100% Source Code. > At its peak approximately 10,000 technicians used MXG and SAS daily. > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
