Back in 2002, DSL was already a reaction to the CD-ROM based distributions which had bloated so much compared to the early days.

One of the first "approachable" Linux distributions circa 1993 was the Soft Landing Systems (SLS) 2-floppy disk set. One held the bootloader and kernel, the other the root filesystem. The kernel disk was swapped out during the boot process, so after that you only needed to leave the root system floppy in. Then, you could use a not uncommon second floppy drive for removable data disks. The SLS system was text console only, but I think (?) had an editor and gcc.

My first persistent installation, Slackware, was on a system with about 8 MB RAM and a 40 MB HDD dedicated to Linux. This had X Windows, Emacs, multiple dev tools, and modem based internet.