Construction of the 10-m Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) was completed in 2005 at a relatively modest cost of $20M and in just 6 years. Following a rather protracted commissioning and science verification phase, during which two major problems were discovered and corrected, briefly reviewed here, it entered full science operations in 2011. This talk will discuss the design and construction of SALT and its First Generation instruments, SALTICAM and the Robert Stobie Spectrograph, and highlight their capabilities, particularly some of the niche observing modes, and will present some examples of initial science results. New SALT instrumentation currently under construction, including the High Resolution Spectrograph and the near IR extension to the RSS, will also be discussed.