Raspbian is an unofficial port of Debian Wheezy armhf with compilation settings adjusted to produce optimized "hard float" code that will run on the Raspberry Pi. This provides significantly faster performance for applications that make heavy use of floating point arithmetic operations. All other applications will also gain some performance through the use of advanced instructions of the ARMv6 CPU in Raspberry Pi.
Although Raspbian is primarily the efforts of Mike Thompson (mpthompson) and Peter Green (plugwash), it has also benefited greatly from the enthusiastic support of Raspberry Pi community members who wish to get the maximum performance from their device.
The history of Raspbian is probably of interest to people curious about what it takes to create an unofficial port of Debian to a new platform. This early history of Raspbian is best documented in the following forum and email archive links below:
