Debian Linux founder Ian Murdock would have been amazed at its legacy – ZDNet

Stephen Shankland/CNET

Let’s go back to 1993. Bill Clinton is president, Jurassic Park is selling out movie tickets, UB40’s redo of Can’t Help Falling in Love is number one on the Billboard charts, and Purdue college student Ian Murdock announces the creation of a new distribution called the Debian Linux Release on the comp.os.linux.development Usenet newsgroup.

Murdock wrote: “This is a release that I have put together basically from scratch; in other words, I didn’t simply make some changes to SLS [Softlanding Linux System] and call it a new release. I was inspired to put together this release after running SLS and generally being dissatisfied with much of it, and after much altering of SLS, I decided that it would be easier to start from scratch.” 

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The name Debian was a portmanteau of Murdock’s then-girlfriend’s name, Debra, and his own first name. And each release — which, today, has reached Debian 12, Bookworm — is named after a Toy Story character.