Quoting Arnt Gulbrandsen (arnt@???):

> Juergen Moebius writes:
> >No, not only Devuan. You forgot the great "Slackware",
> >the mother of Linux distributions.
>
> If we're going to go into ancient history — Slackware was
> (simplifying) a fork of SLS, but SLS wasn't the first either. Either
> ABC or H. J. Lu's nameless microdistribution might be considered to
> be the mother of linux distributions, IMO ABC is closest to that
> epithet. The first to use the source+patches approach was called
> Bogus Linux.

FWIW, starting somewhere in 1992 or 1993 (can't remember for sure), I
actually ftp'd from tsx-11.mit.edu and used H. J. Lu's root-boot
floppy images that were available starting not long after Torvald's
comp.os.minux announcement on Aug. 25, 1991 and first public release
on Sept. 17, 1991 (or rather, a system painfully constructed by
compilation based on Lu's images as a starting point) for something like a
year, before I became aware of Slackware and, with considerable
gratitude, switched to that. Before that, I'd not been aware of
Softlanding Systems's SLS Linux[1], MCC Interim Linux[2] from Manchester
Computing Centre, TAMU[3] (from Texas A&M University), DLD (Deutsche
Linux-Distribution)[4], this ABC thing you mention[5], or even Yggdrasil
Plug-and-Play Linux[6] even though Adam Richter & Bill Selmeier's firm
was in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live.

Back in those days and until around '95 or so in my area, the community
was much more fragmentary, and I don't feel at all sheepish about having
heard the news about Freax^W Linux distributions only slowly even though
if I'd been an avid reader of comp.os.*, I'd have gotten there sooner.

But I can say, having done so, that building and maintaining a Linux
system based on Lu's images was such a rather painful hair-shirt-wearing
experience that I think you can call it a 'Linux distribution' only by
stretching the modern concept. Slack (well, maybe Yggdrasil, actually)
was the first that had _all_ of the essential traits, and was designed
to be fully featured and reasonably maintainable within the expectations
of the day.[7] (The standard view is that SLS, MCC, TAMU, DLD, and
Yggdrasil, predating Slackware, were earlier qualifiers as 'Linux
distributions' but that Lu's images weren't. It depends on your criteria.)

[1] First released in May 1992.
[2] First made available unofficially (by a third party) via ftp in  
    November 1991, but then released Feb. 1992.  
[3] Distribution released in May 1992.
[2] Distribution released some time in 1992.
[5] I'm not doubting your citation, but for the record I've never heard
    of this, only of a couple of much-more-recent distrubtions of the 
    same name that one finds while Web-searching.
[6] Announced on Nov. 24, 1992 and released Dec. 8, 1992, but Richter &
    Selmeier made it available -- notably as the first live-CD distribution --  
    only for the then-significant price of US $99 for quite a long time, 
    so few people tried it.
[7] Slackware got its start as Patrick Volkerding's patchset for SLS
    Linux.