LinusTorvalds released his first LinuxDistribution in 1991. This consisted of just two floppy disks, called "boot" and "root"; the first was the boot disk, which then asked you to put in the second one, which was mounted as the root filesystem.

This was quickly picked up and expanded by groups at Manchester University, Texas A&M University and others. The most popular early distro was SLS (SoftLanding? Systems), which had no PackageManagement to speak of; instead, all software components were built as part of a single monolithic installation. The problems with this led Ian Murdock to found the Debian project in 1994. RedHat was also started the same year. Many others soon followed.

See Also

• Linux Journal, The Ultimate Distro
• Rob Landley's computer history links, including a large collection of links on Linux history.
• Eric Kidd's A History of "Open Source", parts 1 and 2.
• Nikolai Bezroukov's Portraits of Open Source Pioneers some interesting facts and links, accompanied by somewhat lower-quality commentary.
• The Linux Distribution Timeline (PNG image): http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/6663/44218linuxdistrotimelinqv0.png.
• Another Linux distribution timeline.
• The Story Of RPM.
• Some interesting titbits and links in a sidebar to this IBM DeveloperWorks article.
• The Minix Connection.
• Phoronix' "Visual History" series, covering Fedora and Ubuntu.
• The history of glibc and Linux libc at Free Software Magazine.
• Chapter 18 and later of Peter Salus's The Daemon, The Gnu & The Penguin.
• Oldlinux.org -- ancient kernel sources in cross-referenced browseable form, various other bits of ancient kernel info.