On Sun, Oct 05, 2025 at 12:47:25PM +0200, Thomas Schmitt wrote:
It would be interesting to learn more about the early release formats of Debian. Were there floppy sets ? Were there always ISOs for download ?
The first release (debian 1.1) is still available at https://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/debian/dists/buzz/main/disks-i386/
It was IIRC floppy-only, but there were some provisions for getting the base image (and archive mirror) off a (non-bootable) CD. But there was support for both 1.2M and 1.44M floppies! At that time a couple of floppies wasn't a big deal. CD drives were still farely rare, and *bootable* CD drives were even more so. I think windows also generally needed to boot from floppy for a CD install in this period.
The earliest pre-release I know of is https://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/debian/dists/Debian-0.93R6/ which is from late 1995. It does not have a full set of 1.2M floppies; I don't know if they are just missing or hadn't been created yet.
There was no debian 1.0 due to a development release being incorrectly shipped as 1.0 by a third party, so the correct release was labeled 1.1 to avoid confusion.