History of TAA Tools

The TAA Productivity tools first became available in April of 1995, but the inception for TAA Tools started twenty years earlier.

In the early 1970s, Jim Sloan was a System/38 Software Planner for IBM. In the early days of System/38, Jim was on the 'Requirements' committee and recognized that there were many good requirements that IBM developers were not able to implement because of more critical needs.

In the early 80s, Jim began writing a set of CL and RPG programs to solve a variety of user requests. Jim presented these solutions at a series of 10 Common presentations, which received outstanding praise by the user community.

In 1988, IBM first released the AS/400, and by user request, the QUSRTOOL library was reworked by Jim, and made available on the new system. QUSRTOOL was a 'source code' only library and came with a disclaimer from IBM stating that any code was 'as is' (there was no warranty or support solution). The 'TAA' naming convention began as a way to differentiate the new tools. The letters were never an abbreviation for anything, but rather just a unique naming convention.

In early 1993, Jim Sloan left IBM and formed Jim Sloan, Inc. to pursue tool development full-time. IBM agreed to withdraw the TAA Tools from QUSRTOOL. V3R1 was the last release to contain TAA Tools in QUSRTOOL. The QUSRTOOL library was not removed from the system - it still exists, but all of the TAA functions were removed.

The initial QUSRTOOL library on AS/400 held just over 100 TAA Tools. The tool suite has now grown to nearly 2000 tools and is still expanding to meet customer's needs.

On January 1, 2014 TAA Tools Inc. acquired the TAA Productivity Tools from Jim Sloan. Jim continues to act as consultant to the company.

The TAA Productivity Tools began simply, but are now a full scale product with service and support.