The earliest release of Linux by Linus Torvalds

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, jd1008 <jd1008 at gmail.com> said:
> I found
> https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/
> and
> https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-versions/
> and
> http://draconux.free.fr/os_dev/linux0.01.html
> 
> But I cannot find any first CD iso releases.

Linus just does the kernel, not distribution ISOs, so you won't find
any from him.

The earliest Linux I ran was in the pre-distribution days, when H.J. Lu
at MIT (who IIRC maintained the early Linux ports of gcc/binutils and
libc) put together boot/root floppy sets.  You had the "boot" floppy,
which was just a kernel; it would load and then prompt you to insert the
root filesystem floppy and press return.  You then inserted the "root"
floppy, which had your basic root filesystem.

It was a big deal when he trimmed things down enough to make a single
boot/root combined floppy; you didn't have to change disks!  It booted
to a bash prompt, and had basic tools like ls, vi, fdisk, and mkfs.

I don't believe I have any of those old floppy images anymore, and I
didn't find copies when I looked around a few years ago.

I think I still have some Slackware floppies in a box in my storage
room, probably from early 1995.  The oldest Red Hat product I have is
Red Hat Linux 3.0.3 on CD, from 1996.  Since a lot of systems then
didn't boot from CD (or didn't even have CD), the CD set included the
floppy images that you could also use to install.

-- 
Chris Adams <linux at cmadams.net>