Wow. Congratulations! I am too young to really appreciate the difference Debian made to the Linux distributions ecosystem. Did it really ship the first package

Wow. Congratulations! I am too young to really appreciate the difference Debian made to the Linux distributions ecosystem. Did it really ship the first package manager? Didn't it tie the user to a "desktop environment experience" like modern distros do (also Debian, with the Gnome affinity)?