Softlanding Linux System

~ the goodbye ~

In May 1992 Peter MacDonald announced that he had put a complete Linux system onto a stack of floppy disks, with the X Window System on it, and that you could install the whole thing without compiling anything yourself first. Nobody had shipped that before. The slogan he used was "Gentle touchdowns for DOS bailouts", and the audience was people who had heard Linux existed and had no idea where to begin.

Before SLS, running Linux meant collecting a kernel, a C library and a set of utilities from different places and getting them to agree with each other. What MacDonald did was decide on one combination, test it, and cut it onto disks in a fixed order. That decision is the thing every distribution since has inherited, whatever else changed. Red Hat, Debian and the rest are all arguments about which combination, not about whether there should be one.

It shipped as lettered floppy series, twenty-eight disks in total if you wanted everything: a base set, an extras set, the compilers, the documentation, and eleven disks of X on their own. One bad sector meant feeding that disk through again. Releases came fast for a while. Version 1.01 on 18 April 1993, 1.02 ten days after that, 1.03 in August with XFree86 on it, 1.04 in October, then 1.05 the following April with the newly stable 1.0 kernel.

Version 1.06 went out in late 1994 with no date anyone bothered to record precisely, carried on an InfoMagic CD-ROM set that December, and that was the end of it. By then both of the distributions SLS had accidentally caused were better than it was. It had already been history for four years by the time I first got a modem working, which puts it in the part of this site built out of Usenet archives rather than out of anything I remember.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the two forks ~

Patrick Volkerding was at Minnesota State University Moorhead, using SLS and fixing the same handful of things in it over and over. In July 1993 he released his fixed copy as a distribution of its own and called it Slackware. It is still being released in 2026, which makes it the oldest surviving Linux distribution, and its origin is housekeeping on somebody else's work.

Ian Murdock went the other direction. On 16 August 1993 he posted to comp.os.linux.development under the subject "New release under development; suggestions requested", and the complaint behind it was that the distributions available were being maintained carelessly. What he built in response had a package manager and a written policy standing over it. Debian's install base today, counting Ubuntu and everything downstream of it, is a large fraction of the internet.

~ why it was called a soft landing ~

The name was aimed straight at DOS users, and in 1992 that was almost everybody with a PC at home. A DOS user had never seen a filesystem with permissions on it or a machine that expected more than one person to log in. SLS promised the landing would be gentle. It was not especially gentle, which is where the reputation for bugginess came from, but the promise was the right one to make and every installer since has been trying to keep it.

The other half of the pitch was X. A graphical Unix workstation in 1992 was a Sun or a DEC machine costing more than a car. SLS put one on a 386 with four megabytes of RAM and a stack of floppies, and the fact that it crashed sometimes did not change what it was demonstrating.

~ the archive ~

Copies survive because people kept them. SLS 1.02 sits on GitHub, mirrored by someone who thought it was worth preserving. Version 1.03 is on ibiblio in the historic-linux directory, where you can pull down the disk images and read MacDonald's install instructions in the voice of 1993.

What you cannot really do is use it. Everything SLS assumes about hardware stopped being true a long time ago, so the only place it runs is inside an emulator pretending to be a machine from the year it shipped. MacDonald built the first one, and then two better ones were built out of his mistakes, which is a more useful legacy than most distributions ever manage.

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