OSNews

Continuing their historical series looking at the early Linux kernels, KernelTrap is discussing the 0.02 and 0.03 kernels released in late 1991. Though the actual source code has been lost to time, the article offers an interesting collection of emails by Linux creator Linus Torvalds about his new operating system, 'for hackers by a hacker.' Version 0.02 was the first usable release, gaining the ability to run programs such as gcc if compiled on Minix. Version 0.03 fixed buffer-cache issues that made it possible to compile gcc from Linux. Interestingly enough, at this point Linus thought of Linux as a short-lived project saying, "wait for Hurd if you want something real. It's fun hacking it, though (but I'm biased)."