Since Jordan Russell wasn't satisfied with
InstallShield Express, which he had received upon purchase of
Borland Delphi, he decided to make his own installer. The first public version was 1.09. To make an installation package with version 1.09, an "ISS.TXT" file needed to be created in the installation
directory. In the file, the user needed to supply
variables and values, which are still used in Inno Setup today. These variables served as the configuration of the installation package, but many other features could not be changed. The installation
compiler had no
editor and was more of a
shell to compile
scripts. Inno Setup grew popular due to being free for both commercial and non-commercial use. Starting with version 6.5.0, the developers have requested that commercial users purchase a license, although this is not strictly required under the terms of the project's open-source license. Since Inno Setup was based around scripting, fans of Inno Setup started ISTool and ScriptMaker to aid in visual and simpler ways to make installations for Inno Setup. Inno Setup has won many awards, including the Shareware Industry Awards three times in a row from 2002 to 2004. Many people have taken Inno Setup source code and used it to develop
third-party versions of Inno Setup. An example is
My Inno Setup Extensions by Martijn Laan, which was incorporated into Inno Setup in June 2003. == Features==