India, April 28 -- SAS is celebrating 50 years this month. In a special conversation on the occasion, Dr. James Goodnight, CEO, SAS, said in 1976, there was Abbot Labs User Groups. We decided to start a private company, and that's what we did! SAS also pioneered the multi-vendor architecture. We were mainly on mainframes, as were customers. We started getting requests for many computers.

Digital Equipment sold their first computers. Then, IBM came out with PCs in 1981. That was incredibly difficult as it was a 16-bit machine. We rewrote everything, and had the multi-vendor architecture. Goodnight holds his employees in the highest regard, indicating that it is the new ideas that come from employee's brains that make an organization work....