[R] R seven years ago

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Wed, 8 Oct 2008, Liviu Andronic wrote:

> Hello everyone,
>
> As some may know, today Google unveiled its 2001 search index [1]. I
> was curious to see how was R like at that time, and was not
> disappointed. Compared to today's main page [2], seven years ago the
> page looked [3] a bit rudimentary, especially the graphic. (It is wort
> noting that structurally the pages are very similar.) What definitely
> changed is the `Contributed packages' section. Then R featured 29
> contributed packages [4], while now it features 1500+ [5]. It was
> surprising to realize the growth of R during the past seven years.

But that is misleading: there may have been 29 binary Mac builds (in May, 
not Jan 2001?).  In May 2001 according to tests/internet.Rout.save there 
were 106 source packages on CRAN.  (Back then virtually all were available 
as Windows binaries but relatively few as MacOS9 binaries. And all were 
built by hand.)

Another way to look at the growth of R is that the tarball for R 1.2.1 in 
early 2001 was 3.4Mb, and current tarballs (admittedly including ca 3.5Mb 
of recommended packages) are ca 16Mb.

>
> Regards,
> Liviu
>
> [1] http://www.google.com/search2001.html
> [2] http://www.r-project.org/
> [3] http://web.archive.org/web/20010722202756/www.r-project.org/
> [4] http://web.archive.org/web/20010525004023/cran.r-project.org/bin/macos/contrib/src/
> [5] http://cran.at.r-project.org/web/packages/
>
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> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595