As an update to this post, here's a list of the major events in R history since its creation:
- 1992: R development begins as a research project in Auckland, NZ by Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka
- 1993: First binary versions of R published at Statlib
- 1995: R first distributed as open-source software, under GPL2 license
- 1997: R core group formed
- 1997: CRAN founded (by Kurt Hornik and Fritz Leisch)
- 1999: The R website, r-project.org, founded
- 1999: First in-person meeting of R Core team, at inaugural Directions in Statistical Computing conference, Vienna
- 2000: R 1.0.0 released (February 29)
- 2000: John Chambers, recipient of the 1998 ACM Software Systems Award for the S language, joins R Core
- 2001: R News founded (later to become the R Journal)
- 2003: R Foundation founded
- 2004: First UseR! conference (in Vienna)
- 2004: R 2.0.0 released
- 2009: First edition of the R Journal
- 2013: R 3.0.0 released
- 2015: R Consortium founded, with R Foundation participation
- 2016: New R logo adopted
- 2017: CRAN exceeds 10,000 published packages
- 2020: R 4.0.0 released
The presentation below (slides available here) also covers the history of R through 2020.
