I remember DSL - Damn Small Linux, which sat at something like 5-7MB and was pretty feature complete, including a nice package manager.
DSL was my first distro (really second, but it was the first I actually installed on a machine - specifically, the Compaq Presario 1210 my mom handed down to me), and I remember it fondly.
In short: John Andrews created DSL. Robert Shingledecker started contributing patches and got brought in as a developer; he created (among other things) the MyDSL extension system and a bunch of other goodies. DSL started falling apart organizationally, and Andrews "exiled" Shingledecker (in the latter's words) - so Shingledecker carried on with developing Tiny Core Linux instead.