2.3: The very short history of the S and R
R is the statistical environment. In was created as a freeware analog of commercial S-Plus which is in turn was implementation of the S language concept. The S language was first created in 1976 in Bell Labs, and its name was inspired by famous C language (from same Bell Labs). S-Plus started in the end of 1980s, and as many statistical software, was seriously expensive. In August 1993, two New Zealand scientists, Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka, decided to make R (this name was, in turn, inspired by S ). The idea was to make independent realization of S language concept which would differ from S-Plus in some details (for example, in the way it works with local and global variables).
Practically, R is not an imitation of S-Plus but the new “branch” in the family of S software. In 1990s, R was developing slowly, but when users finally realized its truly amazing opportunities (like the system of R extensions— packages , or libraries ) and started to migrate from other statistical systems, R started to grow exponentially. Now, there are thousands of R packages, and R is used almost everywhere! Without any exaggeration, R is now the most important software tool for data analysis .