Here's a refresher on the history of the R project:
- 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 Jornik and Fritz Leisch)
- 1999: The R website, r-project.org, founded
- 2000: R 1.0.0 released (February 29)
- 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
I've added some additional dates gleaned from the r-announce mailing list archives and a 1998 paper on the history of R written by co-founder Ross-Ihaka.
According to the paper, "R began as an experiment in trying to use the methods of Lisp implementors to build a small testbed which could be used to trial some ideas on how a statistical environment might be built." It all stared when
... Robert Gentleman and I became colleagues at The University of Auckland. We both had an interest in statistical computing and saw a common need for a better software environment in our Macintosh teaching laboratory. We saw no suitable commercial environment and we began to experiment to see what might be involved in developing one ourselves.
The paper provides fascinating insights into the beginnings of the R project, and the similarities and differences between it and the S language that preceded it. It's also interesting to see the future goals of the R project as envisioned back in 1998: "to produce a fee implementation of something 'close to' version 3 of the S language"; "development of an integrated user interface"; to get substantial use out of R for statistical work and teaching". I think it's fair to say that in all those areas, especially the latter, the R project has succeeded beyond measure.
Ross Ihaka: R : Past and Future History (PDF) (via Jesse Maegan)