Once upon a time, jd1008 jd1008@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.