Debian was begun in August 1993 by Ian Murdock, then an undergraduate at Purdue
University. Debian was sponsored by the GNU Project of The Free Software Foundation
, the
organization started by Richard Stallman and associated with the General Public
License (GPL), for one year -- from November 1994 to November 1995.
Debian 0.01 through Debian 0.90 were released between August and December of 1993. Ian Murdock writes:
"Debian 0.91 was released in January 1994. It had a primitive package system that allowed users to manipulate packages but that did little else (it certainly didn't have dependencies or anything like that). By this time, there were a few dozen people working on Debian, though I was still mostly putting together the releases myself. 0.91 was the last release done in this way.
Most of 1994 was spent organizing the Debian Project so that others could more
effectively contribute, as well as working on dpkg
(Ian Jackson
was largely responsible for this). There were no releases to the public in
1994 that I can remember, though there were several internal releases as we
worked to get the process right.
Debian 0.93 Release 5 happened in March 1995 and was the first
"modern" release of Debian: there were many more developers by then
(though I can't remember exactly how many), each maintaining their own
packages, and dpkg
was being used to install and maintain all
these packages after a base system was installed.
"Debian 0.93 Release 6 happened in November 1995 and was the last a.out release. There were about sixty developers maintaining packages in 0.93R6. If I remember correctly, dselect first appeared in 0.93R6."
Mr. Murdock also notes that Debian 0.93R6 "... has always been my favorite release of Debian", although he admits to the possibility of some personal bias, as he stopped actively working on the project in March 1996 during the pre-production of Debian 1.0, which was actually released as Debian 1.1 to avoid confusion after a CDROM manufacturer mistakenly labelled an unreleased version as Debian 1.0. That incident led to the concept of "official" CDROM images, as a way for the project to help vendors avoid this kind of mistake.
During August 1995 (between Debian 0.93 Release 5 and Debian 0.93 Release 6),
Hartmut Koptein started the first port for debian, for the Motorola m68k
family. He reports that "Many, many packages were i386-centric (little
endian, -m486, -O6 and all for libc4) and it was a hard time to get a starting
base of packages on my machine (an Atari Medusa 68040, 32 MHz). After three
months (in November 1995), I uploaded 200 packages from 250 available packages,
all for libc5!" Since this time, the Debian Project has grown to include
several ports
to other
architectures, and a port to a new (non-Linux) kernel, the GNU Hurd
microkernel.
An early member of the project, Bill Mitchell, remembers the linux kernel
"... being between 0.99r8 and 0.99r15 when we got started. For a long time, I could build the kernel in less than 30 minutes on a 20 Mhz 386-based machine, and could also do a debian install in that same amount of time in under 10Mb of disk space.
" ... I recall the initial group as including Ian Murdock, myself, Ian Jackson, another Ian who's surname I don't recall,