Slackware was my first real distro in 1995 and I am happy it is still alive and kicking.
It was a floppy disk based distribution. So you end up filling about 20 disks (!) of 1.44MB to install and boot Linux on your old i386 with 1MB of RAM and 40MB of HardDisk. After
some upgrade I finally got a PC with 8MB RAM and 500MB hard disk (and yes, it was a lot of space for that times!).