On August 26, 1991, Finnish university student Linus Benedict Torvalds revealed to members of the comp.os.minix newsgroup that he was working on an operating system as a "hobby." Therefore, this time is also regarded by many enthusiasts as the real birthday of the Linux Kernel.
At that time, Linus said in the email that the operating system he was tinkering with was just an amateur project, and it would not be as large and professional as GNU.
I'm working on a (free) operating system (just a hobby, I'm not going to make it as big and professional as GNU), and plan to make it work on the 386 (486) AT platform. It's been brewing since April and it's almost ready. I'm hoping for feedback from those who like or don't like minix, as my system is somewhat similar (same physical layout of the filesystem - some other things for practical reasons).
I've ported bash (1.08) and gcc (1.40) now, and it seems to work. That means I'll have something practical in a few months. I'd like to know what features most people want, suggestions are welcome, but I can't guarantee that it will be implemented :-)
But Linus did not release Linux on August 26, but privately released Linux 0.01 to some friends on the FTP server (ftp.funet.fi) of the Finnish University and Research Network (FUNET) on September 17 (Linus named it "FREAX" ), and only one or two people downloaded it at the time.
Interpretation of the first version of the Linux kernel (v0.01) open source code
The first public release of Linux 0.02 was on October 5th, and the first standalone version without Minix was 0.11 on Christmas of that year .