A Short History of Debian

In late 1993, a college student and computer enthusiast named Ian Murdock

was using SLS, an early distribution of Linux. He liked Linux but found himself

disappointed that SLS had many problems and that, even worse, new releases

of it failed to fix many of them. Convinced that this was mostly due to an

overloaded, overworked maintainer, he decided to adapt the model used in

the development of Linux itself and use it to create a new distribution with a

decidedly different philosophy. He called the new distribution  Debian Linux ,

and it was to be developed by a distributed group of volunteers. This group

was completely open and anyone was welcome to get involved.

Ian posted his intentions to the Usenet in August of 1993 and immediately

found outside interest in his idea, including that of the Free Software Founda 

tion, the creators of much of the core software of all Linux based systems. Ian

credits this early interest as being pivotal to the acceptance of Debian into the

free software world.

Through the fall and winter of 1993, development of Debian proceeded through

several internal releases, culminating in the public release of Debian 0.91 in

January of 1994. Debian 0.91 gave the world its first glimpse of the Debian

philosophy in action. By this time, a dozen or so people were involved in de 

velopment, though Ian was still largely packaging and integrating the releases

himself.

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