OK, Unix was developed by Bell Labs, way back in the 70's, at roughly the same time as the C programming language, which by the way, linux is written in. Don't be put off by it's age, UNIX by it's nature is very modular, adaptable, and scaleable, anyone telling you such an old OS is low-tech is. . .misinformed.
Now unix is not just a type of OS, but a specification (you'll see the word POSIX thrown around alot.) Your various unixes, *BSD, linux, AIX, solaris, etc, all share similar interfaces and system calls that make them a unix operating system.
Everyone's favorite finn Linus is still in charge of the very actively developed linux kernel, the development version, the 2.5 series, is maintained by him. Many, many, many other hackers contribute to the development, for example, check out kernel.org, and you'll see the -ac kernels, these would be maintained by Alan Cox of Redhat, lots of the major distros employ kernel hackers. Just take a look at any of the Changelogs on the same site, and you'll see a small glimpse of just how many people contribute.
It's also not only the linux kernel that has to do with the progression of the major distros, the GNU (GNU is Not Unix) Project is responsible for many, many, many programs that go into making a
GNU/Linux distribution. Those great software development tools that make linux progress? Thank you GNU.
As for the first distro, I believe slackware (strokes slackware mousepad on desk. . .Got Slack?) was the first
commercial linux distro. Not sure about older non-commercial distributions.
And btw, the very first usage of the linux kernel in 1991, was on Linus' old box, a famous Linus quote tells how he never imagined that it would ever be ported to more than that old hardware.
Silly Linus.
I just edited this in. . .when I realized how similar my response was to Nothinman's. . .allwells, way for me to look like an ass, and Nothinman, way to link to Debian
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