DJGPP began around 1989 as djgcc, after DJ Delorie challenged the claim that GCC could not run on MS-DOS. He built GCC 1.35 on Unix, replacing operating-system calls and creating tools to convert its output into a 32-bit DOS executable. Because the compiler needed more memory than the machine had, he also developed Go32, an extender with virtual-memory support. GCC 1.37 became the first version built on DOS. Delorie later adapted BSD library code for DOS and added custom routines; the system’s headers were based on different sources, which explains some mismatches between headers and libraries. The name changed to DJGPP when C++ was added.
Early milestones expanded the platform’s reach: version 1.03 became widely distributed, 1.05 was among the first commercially available releases, 1.06 added VCPI support, and 1.10 added DPMI. Version 1.11 introduced DPMIEMU, a step toward the second generation. DJGPP 2 was developed to make the system fully self-bootstrapping, partly in response to Cygnus, which used DJGPP for DOS products; the original Go32 depended on a Borland compiler to build. The new approach used djasm to create a 16-bit startup stub and relied on DPMI, provided by CWSDPMI. DJGPP’s 32-bit environment supported ports and rewrites of software including Quake, Info-ZIP, and GhostScript. Version 2.00 shipped in February 1996, followed by 2.01 in October and 2.02 in December 1998.
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