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it seems you answered your own question already, although the wikipedia article mentions one more earlier "distro": H. J. Lu's "Boot-root", the aforementioned disk image pair with the kernel and the absolute minimal tools to get started.
A linux system is built out of many different parts.
The central part is the linux kernel. (You can get it from kernel.org, it is originally written by Linus Torvalds who named it "Linux".)
The kernel by itself is pretty much useless. It manages all kind of hardware and provides an interface for applications to use. To make any use of it you therefore need applications using this kernel.
On the other hand there is the GNU project, initiated by Richard Stallman. Its mission is to create a complete free operating system with all the standard tools around it.
After several years the GNU project went well, they wrote all the standard tools, but they still were missing a working kernel.
So it happened that at the same time there was a project for a kernel without tools (Linux), and a project with all the tools but without a kernel (GNU). As both were written with the same UNIX mindset it was possible to combine them into a full operating system which people aptly called "GNU/Linux".
But even this kind of bare "GNU/Linux" system is not very useful without the software you want to run on it. (Like a browser, a mail server, or anything like this.)
Therefore some distributions (like Debian, RedHat, SuSE, Arch, etc.) went to package a Linux kernel, the GNU tools, and all kind of applications together for easy installation and maintenance. (There are also distributions which use other kernels. For example you can have a Debian system with FreeBSD or GNU-Hurd as a kernel.)
Now for "normal" people, (who for example just want to have a running web browser) this background is much too detailed and they want just a single name for it. So most of the time someone claims he installed "Linux" he usually really installed some distribution which came with a Linux kernel as one part of many.
To cut a long story short, people often just use the name of the central kernel to refer to the whole system.
It is for you to decide what you call an "operating system". Is it just the thing that manages hardware (like Linux) or is it the thing you interact with (like your favorite desktop environment), or maybe something in between like a basic (command line based) GNU/Linux.
Humm, I have a sneaking suspicion that this subject has already covered on a LQ topic. Or at least I answered a similar question on a different Linux forum.
My first distro was RedHat back on 1998, wow I had my 20th anniversary of being a Linux User. I forgot the release number, but it used kernel 2.0.x and at that time users were expected to role there own kernel. I remember upgrading to the 2.4.x back when Linux used the even-odd release pyrimidine.
Humm, I have a sneaking suspicion that this subject has already covered on a LQ topic. Or at least I answered a similar question on a different Linux forum.
My first distro was RedHat back on 1998, wow I had my 20th anniversary of being a Linux User. I forgot the release number, but it used kernel 2.0.x and at that time users were expected to role there own kernel. I remember upgrading to the 2.4.x back when Linux used the even-odd release pyrimidine.
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What is first Linux distributions?
