The History of R (updated for 2020)

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.

 

Comments

[Дмитрий Карабанов]

Microsoft support is great!
But what about Microsoft R Open?
Should we wait for a new fourth MRO release?

[Philipp Probst]

It is Kurt Hornik, not Kurt Jornik. Please correct. ;)

[David Smith]

Fixed, and apologies to Kurt for the typo.

[David Smith]

A new version of MRO is about to enter testing, I should have some news to share soon.

[Kevin]

That's great news David! Thanks a lot for you and your team's work on MRO.

[Wq_yang]

Waiting for the new version :)

[Matt S]

Sorry to continue the pestering but has MRO 4.0.2 entered testing yet? I know 3 weeks ago you said it was about to enter testing so I'm just curious if it's there yet. Thanks!