GCC originated during the middle of the eighties with the Free Software Foundation (FSF). It was developed and written originally as a one-man effort by Richard Stallman, founder of the FSF. The original version contained over 110 thousand lines of code, and it took Stallman a year to complete. The first beta release for GCC was in March 1987 - this was release 0.9; version 1 came out two months later. GCC began to develop rapidly with help coming from programmers interested on working with compilers. GCC continued to develop until in 1997 Cygnus EGCS began working on their version of the compiler collection.
This caused a split in the development in GCC; the Free Software Foundation development of GCC continued, as did the EGCS project, unfortunately both in different directions. Version 1 of the an EGCS compiler was released in December 1997, and support for the FSF compiler floundered.
In April 1999, the EGCS steering committee was appointed by the FSF as the official GCC maintainer. At that time GCC was renamed from the "GNU C Compiler" to the "GNU Compiler Collection" and received a new mission statement.
From this point the development became one branch again, maintained and overseen by one group. GCC 2.95 was released shortly afterwards, and in June 2001 version 3.0 was released. Prior to GCC 3.0, Objective-C, C++, Fortran and Chill were all integrated into the collection; version 3.0 (June 2001) saw the casting away of Chill and Java was integrated into the collection.