The History of Djgpp

>"DJGPP was born around 1989 (originally called djgcc), when Richard Stallman spoke at a meeting of the Northern New England Unix Users Group (NNEUUG) at Data General, where I then worked.

I asked if the FSF ever planned on porting gcc to MS-DOS (I wanted to use it to write a 32-bit operating system for PCs), and he said it couldn't be done because gcc was too big and MS-DOS was a 16-bit operating system. Challenge in hand, I began.

The first gcc I built was 1.35, which I built on an ISC Unix system running on a 386/16. I wrote custom replacements for the system calls, linked with ISC's libc.a, write a custom program to turn the resulting binary into a 32-bit EXE that Phar Lap's extender could use, and had the first gcc that ran on MS-DOS."

I cut my game programming teeth on DJGPP and the Allegro game programming library. Wonderful experience to have such a powerful system available to me, for free! I owe a lot to those days of tinkering and the ability these systems offered to explore.

Thank you for those times.

Side note: the title for this submission really needs to change, which anyone reading the linked article should agree with. It is never spelled with initial caps and then lowercase letters. It literally says so at the very top of the article.