The FreeDOS Alpha 1 distribution was released 16 September 1994. This was the first version of FreeDOS available to download and install.
History
We don't have a complete history of the early FreeDOS releases. The MARC.info page suggests Alpha 1 was late 1994. Looking across the page, the "A1" entry is on the same line as "Paragon 11/94" so perhaps Alpha 1 should be updated to 11/94. That also suggests that Alpha 2 might have been a month later in 12/94, since we know Alpha 3 was released 1/95. This would be around once a month, which sounds right.
From an announcement on Usenet the first "Alpha" was released 9/16/94.
Announcement
(Free-DOS is freely distributable). I have uploaded the first alpha release of the Free-DOS utilities to sunsite.unc.edu in /uploads. Myself, I couldn't see anything in that directory after uploading, but I am told this is normal. If anyone has trouble getting files, post it here. The Free-DOS files will probably sit there until the sysadmin sees them and puts them into their own directory. We will also be getting an acct there to manage the Free-DOS releases. I am also waiting to get email back from the oak.oakland.edu admin, because we were also supposed to release from there. I should apologize now in that I didn't include an exe of "which", one of the new additions to Free-DOS. Sorry. The source is there, though, if you'd care to compile it. Here is the 00_index file from the release: 00_index.txt ============ size modified name description --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5254 sep 15 17:04 coding the coding standards 18321 sep 15 17:04 copying the gnu general public license 292946 sep 15 17:04 exe.zip the executables (in c:\freedos) 112966 Sep 15 18:31 emacs16d.zip Russ Nelson's Freemacs 18925 sep 15 17:04 help.zip the help files (in c:\dos\help\1) 4799 sep 15 17:04 manifest the manifesto 43926 sep 15 17:04 mv.zip source to "mv"--not compiled yet 85517 sep 15 17:04 src.zip the source to all utilities so far 6262 sep 15 17:04 task-lis the task list 148162 sep 15 17:05 unz512x.exe info-zip's unzip (put in your path) 176302 sep 15 17:04 zip20x.zip info-zip's zip (put in your path) This is the first alpha release of Free-DOS, released to ftp sites around the world. For more information, refer to the manifesto and task list or post a question to comp.os.msdos.misc. If you find a problem in any of the utilities presented here, please report them to James....@uwrf.edu. Yes, I am aware of the pathname problem in HELP. I will fix that later. This is not a complete posting of all the Free-DOS utilities. Some simply weren't ready for release when this was put together, and others haven't been started yet. If you would like to help out, please see the task list. Thanks to everyone helping with Free-DOS.