In 1988, S-PLUS was first developed and released by a Seattle-based start-up company called Statistical Sciences, Inc. The company's founder and sole owner was R. Douglas Martin, professor of statistics at the
University of Washington, Seattle. Martin originally learned S while working at Bell Laboratories, where the S language was originally developed. Statistical Sciences acquired the exclusive license to distribute S and merged with MathSoft in 1993, becoming the firm's Data Analysis Products Division (DAPD). In 1995, S-PLUS 3.3 for
Windows 95/NT was released, including the Matrix library, command history capability, and Trellis graphics. This was followed by the release of S-PLUS 3.4 for UNIX in 1996. This version included a
non-linear mixed-effects modeling library, hexagonal binning, and cluster methods. S-PLUS 4 was released for Windows in 1997, with features such as an updated GUI, integration with
Excel, and editable graphics. S-PLUS 4.5 for Windows in 1998, with
Scatterplot brushing, and the ability to create S-PLUS graphs from within
Excel &
SPSS. The software also became available for Linux &
Solaris. In 1999, S-PLUS 5 was released for Solaris, Linux,
HP-UX,
AIX,
IRIX, and
DEC Alpha. S-PLUS 2000 for Windows. 3.3,
quality control charting, and new commands for data manipulation. This was followed by S-PLUS 6 for
Linux/
Unix in 2000. This version had a Java-based GUI, Graphlets, survival5, and a library for handling missing data. In 2001, MathSoft sold its Cambridge-based Engineering and Education Products Division (EEPD), was renamed Insightful Corporation, and moved headquarters to Seattle. This essentially reversed the previous merger between MathSoft and Statistical Sciences, Inc. S-PLUS Analytic Server 2.0. S-PLUS 6 was released for Windows in 2001. In 2002, StatServer 6 was released and the student edition of S-PLUS became free. S-PLUS 6.2 was released and ported to AIX. In 2004, Insightful purchased the S language from
Lucent Technologies for $2 million, and released S+ArrayAnalyzer 2.0. S-PLUS 7.0 was released in 2005, including the BigData library for working with larger-than-memory data sets and the S-PLUS Workbench (
Eclipse development tool). Insightful Miner 7.0 was also released. In 2007, S-PLUS 8 was released with a new package system, language extensions for
R package compatibility, and a workbench debugger. TIBCO acquired Insightful Corporation for $25 million in 2008. ==See also==