Today, its been 20 years since Martin Mächler started the R-help community list. The first post was written by Ross Ihaka on 1997-04-01:

Subject: R-alpha: R-testers: pmin heisenbug From: Ross Ihaka <ihaka at stat.auckland.ac.nz> When: Tue Apr 1 10:35:48 CEST 1997 Screenshot of the very first post to the R-help mailing list.

This is a post about R’s memory model. We’re talking R v0.50 beta. I think that the paragraph at the end provides a nice anecdote on the importance not to be overwhelmed by problems ahead:

”(The consumption of one cell per string is perhaps the major memory problem in R - we didn’t design it with large problems in mind. It is probably fixable, but it will mean a lot of work).”

We all know the story; an endless number of hours has been put in by many contributors throughout the years, making The R Project and its community the great experience it is today.

Thank you!

PS. This is a blog version of my R-help post with the same content.