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:
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.
Today it’s 16 years ago and 367,496 messages later since Martin Mächler started the R-help (321,119 msgs), R-devel (45,830 msgs) and R-announce (547 msgs) mailing lists [1] - a great benefit to all of us. Special thanks to Martin and also thanks to everyone else contributing to these forums.
[1] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/1997-April/001490.html
