--- title: "S at 50" author: "Martyn Plummer" date: 2026-05-05 categories: ["History"] tags: ["anniversary"] --- Today marks 50 years since Rick Becker and John Chambers presented a new project to a few of their colleagues in Statistics and Data Analysis research at Bell Labs. John writes: > It had no name and we were unsure what it was, exactly. A few months later it was named S, initially called an interactive environment. Only a revised version was referred to as a language. (Lately I’ve been labelling it R Version 0.) A poster by Balasubramanian Narasimhan summarizes 50 years of S and R. You can [download](../../../../post/S-at-50/s_at_50_poster.jpg) the full size poster or open up the image below in a new tab to see it full size.