It has been 30 years since the first public release of the Linux kernel. Kernel 0.01 had a size of 62 KB when compressed, included 88 files, and contained 10,239 lines of source code. According to Linus Torvalds, the publication of kernel 0.01 is indeed the true anniversary date of the project.
Linus wrote in the Linux kernel developers' mailing list:
This is just a random observation to let people know that today is actually one of the key dates in the 30-year anniversary: version 0.01 was uploaded on September 17, 1991.
Release 0.01 was never publicly announced, and I only wrote about it to a handful of people privately (and I don't have the old emails from those days), so there are no actual records of this. I suspect that the only information about the date is in the tar file of Linux-0.01 itself.
Unfortunately, the dates in this tar file are the dates of the last changes, not the actual creation date of the tar file, but it seems that it happened around 7:30 PM (Finnish time), so the exact anniversary was technically a few hours ago.
I thought it was worth mentioning this, as despite the lack of announcement, in many ways this is the true date of the 30-year anniversary of the actual code.
Source: opennet.ru
