The book ``S: An Interactive Environment for Data Analysis and Graphics'' (Wadsworth, 1984), by Richard A. Becker and John M. Chambers, and an earlier Bell Labs report in 1981, introduced the S statistical software system that later evolved into the commercial S-Plus system (now defunct, I think), and the vibrant and active R system (https://cran.r-project.org/) that we use at Utah in our statistics courses. Almost 21,000 open-source packages for R are available, and they appear to be the dominant form of statistical software package publication, based on extensive evidence in our bibliography archives that completely cover numerous journals in probability and statistics. I'm interested in looking into the early S source code, if possible, to see how some statistical software that I am freshly implementing for high-precision computation was handled at Bell Labs more than four decades ago. Does anyone on this list know whether the original S system was ever distributed in source code to commercial sites, and academic sites, that licensed Unix from Bell Labs in the 1980s? Does that code still exist (and is openly accessible), or has it been lost? As with the B, C, D, and R programming languages, it is rather hard for Web search engines to find things that are known only by a single letter of the alphabet. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------