My first exposure to S was on an AT&T 3B2 (a 3B2/100, I think), at the Auckland (Mt Albert) Applied Mathematics Division Station of the NZ Dept of Scientific and Industrial Research. The AMD Head Office in Wellington had one also. There may have been one or more others; I cannot remember. This would have been in 1983, maybe.
It was a superbly engineered machine, but the sofware (System V, version 3.2) had its problems. If you back deleted too far along the command line, something unpleasant (losing the line? or worse?) happened. On typing 1+1 at the S command line, it took a second to get an answer. John Maindonald email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] phone : +61 2 (6125)3473 fax : +61 2(6125)5549 Centre for Mathematics & Its Applications, Room 1194, John Dedman Mathematical Sciences Building (Building 27) Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200. On 27 Dec 2007, at 10:00 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > From: roger koenker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Date: 27 December 2007 9:56:45 AM > To: Greg Snow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Cc: R-help list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: Re: [R] Reminiscing on 20 years using S > > On Dec 26, 2007, at 2:05 PM, Greg Snow wrote: > >> I realized earlier this year (2007) that it was in 1987 that I first >> started using an early version of S (it was ported to VMS and was >> called >> success). That means that I have been using some variant of S (to >> various degrees) for over 20 years now (I don't feel that old). > > Boxing day somehow seems appropriate for this thread. R.I.P. to all > those old boxes > of yesteryore and the software that ran on them -- and yet there is > always a residual archaeological curiosity. > > I discovered recently that the MIT athena network contains a circa > 1989 version > of S: http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/astaff/project/Sdev/S/ which > made me wonder > whether there was any likelihood that one could recreate "S Thu Dec > 7 16:49:47 EST 1989". > Curiosity is one thing, time to dig through the layers of ancient > civilizations is quite another. > But if anyone would like to offer a (preferably educated) guess > about the feasibility of such a project, like I said, I would be > curious. > > > url: www.econ.uiuc.edu/~roger Roger Koenker > email [EMAIL PROTECTED] Department of > Economics > vox: 217-333-4558 University of Illinois > fax: 217-244-6678 Champaign, IL 61820 ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.