God, I feel old.
I don't use Debian much these days, certainly not as a desktop, but it will forever be the "real" Linux distribution in my heart. Without the ongoing work of umpteen Debian package managers, you wouldn't have Ubuntu (and all its humongous downstream), Knoppix, and so on.
Each set of discs is for one architecture only.
I still remember when Fedora moved to DVDs. I was quite frustrated because I didn't have a DVD burner at the time. Almost 13 years later and my distro of choice fits on a single CD-R; I guess I've come full circle.
I had to install my first Debian hit (1.1 / buzz) via recycled floppies downloaded over a 33.6k dialup.
There is not a single time at my life since where I haven't had a Debian installation somewhere since (currently have 46 machines running it at my command).
My first Linux experience was downloading Slackware over a slow modem line (I want to say 14.4, but it was a while ago) onto floppies.
I quickly upgraded it using dist-upgrade to unstable, which was potato at the time (testing didn't exist yet).
Thanks for all your hard work, and especially for introducing me to Debian. Have a wonderful Debian birthday!
I'm not sure if it is actually a part of the Debian project or just something that grew alongside. Can be useful sometimes, but if your present channels work for you then I'd suggest you might want to do without the 'noise'[1]
[1] http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=106389
PS: never ceases to amaze me that you can download an iso, boot a computer, install an operating system and application software, and do stuff just when you want to without upfront cost (other than time). Debian is a large part of that history isn't it?
Debian was an early full Linux distribution, but it wasn't the first. Debians big (early) contribution was apt, which could install packages and resolve dependencies over the internet and made package management easier than rpm based distributions of the time.
It's a little hard to view in landscape mode but Wikipedia has this cool graphic to show the development of Linux distros.
Linux has come a long way... =)
It would be even cooler if there was some indication of popularity over time as well, e.g. via variation in line thickness or something (...image gets even bigger... ><).
That is quite the understatement. I can remember the shock and amazement that came over me the first time I used apt. It was one of those computing moments that I will always remember.
Unfortunately I also remember being frightened whenever I had to read the XFree86 README and saw the section about video cards setting on fire.
[1] And to a lesser extent xserver-xorg-{input-all|video-all}