Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Pali Canon is the standard collection of scriptures in the Theravada Buddhist tradition, preserved in the Pali language. It is the most complete extant early Buddhist canon and derives mainly from the Tambapaṇṇiya school.
The Pali Canon was first committed to writing in Sri Lanka at the Fourth Buddhist Council in 29 BC, approximately 454 years after the death of Gautama Buddha. The texts were written on palm leaves, likely under the patronage of King Vattagamani.
The three pitakas are the Vinaya Pitaka (rules of the monastic community), the Sutta Pitaka (discourses and sermons of the Buddha, the largest basket), and the Abhidhamma Pitaka (systematic philosophical analysis of Buddhist doctrine, particularly about mind). Pitaka means "basket" in Pali, referring to the receptacles that held the palm-leaf manuscripts.
Scholarly views fall into three camps: attribution to the Buddha and his early followers, attribution to the period of pre-sectarian Buddhism before schools separated around the 4th-3rd century BC, and agnosticism. Richard Gombrich argues the main teachings are coherent enough to be the work of a single person, the Buddha himself; others such as Ronald Davidson have little confidence that much surviving scripture is actually the Buddha's word.
The first complete printed edition of the Pali Canon was published in Burma in 1900, in 38 volumes. The Pali Text Society's scholarly Roman-script edition appeared between 1877 and 1927 in 57 volumes including indexes.
The Chinese Buddhist Canon, whose standard modern edition is the Taisho Revised Tripitaka with over 80,000 pages, and the Tibetan Kangyur of about a hundred volumes are not translations of the Pali Canon and differ from it to varying extents. Both contain some recognizably similar early works, but their Abhidharma books are fundamentally different from the Pali Abhidhamma Pitaka, and both include Mahayana sutras and Vajrayana tantras that have few parallels in the Pali Canon.