From the Grandpa dept.:
The Debian community is pleased to celebrate its 19th birthday since Ian Murdock's original founding announcement. Quoting from the official project history: The Debian Project was officially founded by Ian Murdock on August 16th, 1993. At that time, the whole concept of a 'distribution' of Linux was new. Ian intended Debian to be a distribution which would be made openly, in the spirit of Linux and GNU.

A lot has happened to the project and its community in the past nineteen years. There have been eleven releases - most recently Debian 6.0 Squeeze in February 2011 - and a huge amount of free software packaged. The current unstable branch consists of more than 37,000 binary packages for the amd64 architecture alone - over 46 GB of Free/Libre Software! Since last year's birthday new steps to portability have been made; 11 official ports are now available, amongst which Debian/kFreeBSD deserves a special mention for successfully integrating a non-Linux kernel within the project.