Reminiscing on 20 years using S
My introduction to S was around 1984 on a 3B20 and VAX systems at Bell Labs. I still have a copy of the "brown" book written by Becker and Chambers on the "S Interactive Language" (copyright 1984). I remember the "graphical" output on a daisy-wheel printer and using the HP plotter that was connected in serial with the terminal you were using. When you wanted to plot, escape sequences were sent so the plotter interpreted the output and plotted on paper that it moved back and forth as the pens went horizontal. It has changed a lot, but has also stayed the same in a number of ways.
On Dec 27, 2007 5:12 PM, John Maindonald <john.maindonald at anu.edu.au> wrote:
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: john.maindonald at anu.edu.au 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, r-help-request at r-project.org wrote:
From: roger koenker <roger at ysidro.econ.uiuc.edu> Date: 27 December 2007 9:56:45 AM To: Greg Snow <Greg.Snow at imail.org> Cc: R-help list <R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch> 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 rkoenker at uiuc.edu Department of Economics vox: 217-333-4558 University of Illinois fax: 217-244-6678 Champaign, IL 61820
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