On 02/25/2015 09:08 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
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.
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.