From b.rowlingson at lancaster.ac.uk  Mon Feb 29 17:40:45 2016
From: b.rowlingson at lancaster.ac.uk (Barry Rowlingson)
Date: Mon, 29 Feb 2016 16:40:45 +0000
Subject: [Rd] Source code of early S versions
Message-ID: <CANVKczMqo7qC1OU-a2sq3LHTP9T5k+xCuLXZUvpNmd323aWaWg@mail.gmail.com>

According to Wikipedia:

"In 1980 the first version of S was distributed outside Bell
Laboratories and in 1981 source versions were made available."

but I've been unable to locate any version of S online. Does anyone
have a copy, somewhere, rusting away on an old hard disk or slowly
flaking off a tape? I've had a rummage round the CMU Statlib on
archive.org but no sign of it, and its hard to search for "S"
generally.

 Obviously this would be for archaeological purposes, but there's
bound to be someone out there who'd like to try and compile it on a
modern system. It might at least be nice to see it in a nice format on
Gitlab, for example. But maybe there's licensing problems.

 Anyone interested in the history of S should read Richard Becker's
article from the mid 90s:

http://sas.uwaterloo.ca/~rwoldfor/software/R-code/historyOfS.pdf

Barry

[apologies if S talk is off-topic. Surprisingly I've just discovered
the S-news mailing list still runs, but looking at the recent archive
I don't think I'd get much success there]



[Rd] Source code of early S versions
Barry Rowlingson