The Wikipedia statement may be a bit misleading. S was never open source. Source versions would only have been available with a nondisclosure agreement, and relatively few copies would have been distributed in source. There was a small but valuable "beta test" network, mainly university statistics departments.
And two shameless plugs: 1. there is a chapter on the history of all this in my forthcoming book on "Extending R" 2. Rick Becker will give a keynote talk on the history of S at the useR! 2016 conference (user2016.org); 2016 is the 40th anniversary of the first work on S. John PS: somehow "historical" would be less unnerving than "archeological" On Feb 29, 2016, at 8:40 AM, Barry Rowlingson <b.rowling...@lancaster.ac.uk> wrote: > 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] > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel