Authoritative answer:

http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/history-of-haskell/index.htm

GHC was begun in January 1989 at the University of Glasgow, as soon
as the initial language design was fixed. The first version of GHC was
written in LML by Kevin Hammond, and was essentially a new front end to
the Chalmers LML compiler.

...

GHC proper was begun in the autumn of 1989, by a team consisting
initially of Cordelia Hall, Will Partain, and Peyton Jones. It was
designed from the ground up as a complete implementation of Haskell in
Haskell, bootstrapped via the prototype compiler. The only part that was
shared with the prototype was the parser, which at that stage was still
written in Yacc and C. The first beta release was on 1 April 1991 (the
date was no accident), but it was another 18 months before the first
full release (version 0.10) was made in December 1992.

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