Not strictly true, really. Ygddrasil was a bootable Linux distro on a CD which was available during the '93/'94 period .. I was always pretty sad that they stopped the project. It could've been a contender ..
shrug I was using one of the first versions of Slackware at that time. I can't remember exactly how easy it was to use as it has been a while. Probably I'm just blocking it from memory as it was Slackware :P.
It really wasn't that bad - not quite as super slick as OS installs these days but most of the grief tended to come from having to do things like install it from a stack of floppy disks.