en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Koch

This sentence appears to conflate GnuPG's first production release with its first release of any kind.

Official GnuPG sources say the project was introduced earlier than 1999:

• The official GnuPG homepage states: "Since its introduction in 1997, GnuPG is Free Software."
• In Werner Koch's own historical note, "A Short History of the GNU Privacy Guard," he writes that the very first version was released on December 20, 1997 as version 0.0.0.
• The official GnuPG release notes separately say that version 1.0.0 was released on September 7, 1999 and describe that as the first production version.

So the accurate distinction is:

• First release: December 20, 1997
• First production release (1.0.0): September 7, 1999

Because the article says the first release was in 1999, it is factually incorrect.