[R] prehistoric versions of R --> 1995!

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "UweL" == Uwe Ligges <ligges at statistik.uni-dortmund.de>
>>>>>     on Tue, 07 Feb 2006 08:56:10 +0100 writes:

    UweL> Petr Pikal wrote:
    >> Hi
    >> 
    >> On 6 Feb 2006 at 15:57, ivo welch wrote:
    >> 
    >> Date sent:      	Mon, 6 Feb 2006 15:57:30 -0500
    >> From:           	ivo welch <ivowel at gmail.com>
    >> To:             	Sean Davis <sdavis2 at mail.nih.gov>
    >> Copies to:      	piet.vanremortel at gmail.com, r-help <r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch>
    >> Subject:        	Re: [R] R loop
    >> 
    >> 
    >>>>> data[ data$a == "name2" ]  # does not work and gives a weird
    >>>>> result,  yuck
    >>>> 
    >>>> data[data$a=="name2",]
    >>>> 
    >>> 
    >>> sorry about this.  I believe a few versions back, one could not subset
    >>> data frames, so I did not even check what I wrote.  Works now.
    >> 
    >> 
    >> It depends on what you consider few versions back. I started with R 
    >> vesion 1.2.0 about 10 years 

    UweL> I bet 200$ (or EUR) you have not used R 10 years ago. ;-)

    UweL> People certainly remember the 1.0.0 release at the remarkable day 
    UweL> 29-FEB-2000.
    UweL> 1.2.0 was released in December 2000, about 5 years ago.
    UweL> I started with 0.62.x in 1998.
    UweL> The oldest version I found on CRAN is a pre-alpha R.sea.hqx for the Mac 
    UweL> dated 07-Nov-1996.

Eehm; that has a wrong date (or then it would not be pre-alpha):
I've always entertained the prehistoric directory of R sources
at ftp://stat.ethz.ch/Software/R/alpha/PreHistoric/
and its oldest file is 
         Name	           Size    Date        
         R-0.1alpha.tar.gz 861464  Feb 12 1996 

(which will be 10 years coming Sunday -- what a jubilee!!)
So, even that is not pre-alpha; and yes, that was a bit before CRAN existed. 

Now to the pre-alpha history.  I've digged some more and found

1) that the mac file mentioned above would have
   correct date 'Nov 6 1995' (at least that's the date I saved
   when I looked at the Auckland FTP server through Emacs ange-ftp).

2) The oldest stuff that I have is all from 1995;
   The source I (think I) had first used is dated June 20 1995;
   notably the  R-unix-src.tar.gz with accompanying README and
   INSTALL files
   (There was also ./win subdirectory which I did not use, with
    files all from July 15, 1995; AFAIK done by Robert Gentleman)

 I've now put a bit of these oldest files into
  ftp://stat.ethz.ch/Software/R/alpha/PreHistoric/pre-alpha/

3) I've kept an e-mail that Ross had sent me on July 28 with
   two small patches to the (June 20) sources.
   
   Yes, chances are pretty high that I was the first one outside
   of the Auckland(NZ)-community to actively use R.
 
Note it might be interesting to find even older sources, but that
would most probably have to be by Robert and Ross (or a
sysadmin at Auckland).


Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich