[TUHS] [tuhs] Early statistical software in Unix

[TUHS] [tuhs] Early statistical software in Unix

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

The book ``S: An Interactive Environment for Data Analysis and
Graphics'' (Wadsworth, 1984), by Richard A. Becker and John
M. Chambers, and an earlier Bell Labs report in 1981, introduced the 
S statistical software system that later evolved into the commercial
S-Plus system (now defunct, I think), and the vibrant and active R
system (https://cran.r-project.org/) that we use at Utah in our
statistics courses.

Almost 21,000 open-source packages for R are available, and they
appear to be the dominant form of statistical software package
publication, based on extensive evidence in our bibliography archives
that completely cover numerous journals in probability and statistics.

I'm interested in looking into the early S source code, if possible,
to see how some statistical software that I am freshly implementing
for high-precision computation was handled at Bell Labs more than four
decades ago.

Does anyone on this list know whether the original S system was ever
distributed in source code to commercial sites, and academic sites,
that licensed Unix from Bell Labs in the 1980s?  Does that code still
exist (and is openly accessible), or has it been lost?

As with the B, C, D, and R programming languages, it is rather hard
for Web search engines to find things that are known only by a single
letter of the alphabet.

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- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                                                          -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe@math.utah.edu  -
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