The Wikipedia statement may be a bit misleading.
S was never open source. Source versions would only have been available with a
nondisclosure agreement, and relatively few copies would have been distributed
in source. There was a small but valuable "beta test" network, mainly
university statistics departments.
And two shameless plugs:
1. there is a chapter on the history of all this in my forthcoming book on
"Extending R"
2. Rick Becker will give a keynote talk on the history of S at the useR! 2016
conference (user2016.org); 2016 is the 40th anniversary of the first work on S.
John
PS: somehow "historical" would be less unnerving than
"archeological"
On Feb 29, 2016, at 8:40 AM, Barry Rowlingson <b.rowlingson at
lancaster.ac.uk> wrote:
> According to Wikipedia:
>
> "In 1980 the first version of S was distributed outside Bell
> Laboratories and in 1981 source versions were made available."
>
> but I've been unable to locate any version of S online. Does anyone
> have a copy, somewhere, rusting away on an old hard disk or slowly
> flaking off a tape? I've had a rummage round the CMU Statlib on
> archive.org but no sign of it, and its hard to search for "S"
> generally.
>
> Obviously this would be for archaeological purposes, but there's
> bound to be someone out there who'd like to try and compile it on a
> modern system. It might at least be nice to see it in a nice format on
> Gitlab, for example. But maybe there's licensing problems.
>
> Anyone interested in the history of S should read Richard Becker's
> article from the mid 90s:
>
> http://sas.uwaterloo.ca/~rwoldfor/software/R-code/historyOfS.pdf
>
> Barry
>
> [apologies if S talk is off-topic. Surprisingly I've just discovered
> the S-news mailing list still runs, but looking at the recent archive
> I don't think I'd get much success there]
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel