GCC started in 1986 with the 0.9 release in 1988, along with gas, and binutils. It originally targeted the 68020 and the VAX. Naturally more platforms were added.

GCC 0.9 can be found, but many of the early versions until 1.21 seem to have been lost. I've been on and off trying to catalog some of this stuff, as you pointed out there was a lot of ground work getting Minix on the 8086, then the Bruce Evans 80386 port of Minix which then could be used to cross compile Linux using GCC 1.40... Although using the DJGPP MS-DOS port of GCC as a template I am able to build early Linux kernels on Windows using the old FSF GCC and binutils. So theoretically it could be cross compiled from MS-DOS.

And there is of course, the original Libc, and bash which was the original environment, then later the GNU filesystem utils.

oldinux.org has many of these old software artifacts to check out, along with vim.org

http://ftp.vim.org/languages/gcc/old-releases/gcc-1/

And here for some binutils going back to 1988

https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/sourceware.org/pub/binutils/old-releases/

On March 15, 2017 12:20:06 AM GMT+08:00, Arthur Krewat <krewat@kilonet.net> wrote:
Everything. I'm trying to grok how long Linux as a whole was in active 
development. That includes all the GNU utilities, GCC, everything.

Just like a "regular" corporate development environment would have 
devoted to the cause :)



On 3/14/2017 11:57 AM, Michael Kjörling wrote:
 On 14 Mar 2017 11:51 -0400, from krewat@kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat):
 in reality, how much of Linux was based on previous works?
 Linux the kernel, or Linux the usable operating system (which would
 include at least the essential userspace parts)?


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