The earliest release of Linux by Linus Torvalds

[jd1008]

On 02/25/2015 09:08 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
> 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.
>
Thank you for your post.
Reason I was looking for CD was my incorrect assumption
that it might have been available.
I did locate some floppy images on the web.