A Brief History of R
R is an implementation of the S programming language which is combined with lexical scoping semantics, inspired by Scheme. It was created by John Chambers and his colleagues at Bell Lab in 1976. It was designed for researchers to do the data analysis. There are some important differences, but much of the code written for S runs unaltered. R was created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and currently developed by the R Development Core Team.
What is R?
R is a pretty popular language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is also widely used in both statistical software development and data analytics field. R provides a wide variety of statistical functions and it is also highly extensible. Unlike S programming language, R was designed to provide an open source for people who are involved in statistical research.
A Free Software
R as a free software is available for all the computer operation systems, which means that anyone can install and use on his/her own computer. R allows everyone even for those who have no programming background to organize data and present the findings.
Reference
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(programming_language)#History