Here is a link to the first mention of Debian. It is hard to believe it has been 14 years since it was started.

“This is just to announce the imminent completion of a brand-new Linux release,which I’m calling the Debian Linux Release. This is a release that I have put together basically from scratch; in other words, I didn’t simply make some changes to SLS and call it a new release.”

Read the rest of the release