r programming: Releases of the R programming

Milestones

Version 0.16 – This is the last alpha version developed primarily by Ihaka and Gentleman. Much of the basic functionality from the "White Book" (see S history) was implemented. The mailing lists commenced on April 1, 1997.
Version 0.49 – April 23, 1997 – This is the oldest available source release, and compiles on a limited number of Unix-like platforms [1]. CRAN is started on this date, with 3 mirrors that initially hosted 12 packages [2]. Alpha versions of R for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS are made available shortly after this version.
Version 0.60 – December 5, 1997 – R becomes an official part of the GNU Project [3]. The code is hosted and maintained on CVS (since September 17, 1997 — although anonymous access wasn't granted until November 12, 1999).
Version 1.0.0 – February 29, 2000 – Considered stable enough for production use [4].
Version 1.4.0 - December 19, 2001 – S4 methods are introduced [5], and the first version for Mac OS X is made available soon after [6].
Version 2.0.0 – October 4, 2004 – Introduced lazy loading, which enables fast loading of data with minimal expense of system memory [7].
Version 2.1.0 – April 18, 2005 – Support for UTF-8 encoding, and the beginnings of internationalization and localization for different languages [8].
Version 2.5.0 – April 24, 2007 – Object name completion by integration of package ‘rcompletion’, and ‘Rscript’ front-end, which enables shell-like R scripting [9].
Version 2.6.0 – October 3, 2007 – Improved handling of data with a large number of identical strings [10].
Version 2.7.0 – April 22, 2008 – Improvements of graphics output, and change of default device from PostScript to PDF [11].
Version 2.8.0 - October 20, 2008 - var(), cov(), cor(), sd() etc now by default (when 'use' is not specified) return NA in many cases where they signalled an error before.