The evolvement of F#
Press began mentioning (http://developers.slashdot.org/story/02/06/08/0324233/f---a-new-net-language) the F# programming language in the Summer of 2002 as a research project at Microsoft Research Cambridge (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/labs/cambridge/) aiming to create a dialect of OCaml language (https://ocaml.org/) running on top of the .NET platform. Computer scientist Don Syme (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/dsyme/) was in charge of design and the first implementation.
Predecessors
The F# project of Microsoft Research Cambridge didn't come from scratch. F# belongs to ML (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming language)) programming language family. It predecessors are Standard ML (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_ML) and OCaml. Moreover, F# initially had a twin project at Microsoft Research Cambridge named SML.NET, which aimed at bringing Standard ML (SML) to the .NET platform.
F# Version 1
The first release took place in...