The Foundational Years
1991-1995. Linus releases the kernel; Patrick Volkerding ships the first usable distro; Ian Murdock and Bob Young start two families that will dominate the next thirty years.
8 moments in this segment.
- — MCC Interim Linux. Founder: Owen Le Blanc · First release: 1992 Released February 1992 by Owen Le Blanc at Manchester Computing Centre — the first Linux distribution as we'd understand the term today. Predated Slackware by 18 months. Existed primarily to make Linux installable on machines without manual file-by-file copying.
- — TAMU Linux. Founder: Texas A&M University · First release: 1992 Released May 1992 at Texas A&M. First Linux distribution to include X Window System out of the box. Distributed on 21 floppy disks via FTP.
- — Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X. Founder: Adam J. Richter · First release: 1992 Released December 1992 by Adam Richter's Yggdrasil Computing. First commercial Linux distribution sold on CD-ROM. Influenced Linux's licensing politics: Richter sold the boxed software, but the underlying GPL'd source remained free.
- — Softlanding Linux System (SLS). Founder: Peter MacDonald · First release: 1992 Released May 1992 by Peter MacDonald in Vancouver. The first Linux distribution to include both X Window and TCP/IP networking. Both Slackware and Debian were initially built from SLS bases; the entire 1993-1995 distro family tree starts here.
- — Slackware. Founder: Patrick Volkerding · First release: 1993 The oldest actively-maintained Linux distribution. Patrick Volkerding cut Slackware 1.0 in Bloomington, Minnesota in July 1993 — built off Softlanding Linux System (SLS) which itself was already five months old. The Slackware design philosophy stays Unix-purist for thirty-plus years: simple init, no fancy package manager beyond `installpkg`, configure things by hand. Still shipping.
- — Debian. Founder: Ian Murdock · First release: 1993 Founded by Ian Murdock at Purdue in August 1993, named for him + his then-girlfriend Debra. The first distro to be community-governed rather than corporate-led, with a written Social Contract (1997) and a release-on-quality not release-on-schedule cadence. Apt, dpkg, and the universe of Debian derivatives — Ubuntu chief among them — all flow from this single project.
- — SUSE. Founder: Software- und System-Entwicklung · First release: 1994 Born in Nuremberg in March 1994 as S.u.S.E. — Software und System-Entwicklung — initially a Slackware reseller for the German market. SUSE Linux 4.2 (1996) was the first own-branded release. YaST, the all-in-one configuration tool, became the European answer to Red Hat's text-mode installer.
- — Red Hat Linux. Founder: Bob Young · Marc Ewing · First release: 1995 The first commercially-successful Linux distribution. Marc Ewing produced the initial Red Hat releases (named for the red Cornell lacrosse cap he wore in college); Bob Young's ACC Bookstores acquired and commercialised it. Red Hat Linux ran from 1995 to 2003 before being retired in favor of RHEL (enterprise) and Fedora (community).
