sasaki@HARVARD.HARVARD.EDU (Marty Sasaki) (01/16/86)
If you remember from last time, SAS version 5 had been delivered but didn't work on VMS 4.2. A note with the distribution said that soon there would be another release that would run on 4.2. After making a posting to this group, I received a very nice phone call from the VP in charge of mini-computer SAS from the SAS Institute. I was assured that they were working on it. We received another tape in the mail around January 1 that was supposed to be the latest revision that would finally work. We installed the newest version, and it seems to work, except for one small problem, you can't read data in from a file. A call to the SAS Institute told us that this was a known problem and that they were working on it. Forgive this mild flame, but this is just bad software management. Reading an input file is so basic a task in SAS that the tape shouldn't have left the SAS Institute. Wasn't the software tested? What kind of software manufacturer ships untested software? If the software was tested, why was the test so inadequate? Why are we paying for software that doesn't work? Tune in next time, when we will answer the questions: Does SAS V5 work yet? Have all of our SAS users gone back to IBMland were SAS seems to work? Are we stupid enough to buy another year of non-existant maintenance? Marty Sasaki Usual disclaimer: These are my views and not those of my employer's, Harvard University.