Linux: The 0.02 and 0.03 Releases

“‘Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men
and wrote their own device drivers?’ began the October 5th, 1991
announcement for Linux kernel version 0.02 on the comp.os.minix
newsgroup. In the release notes, Linus Torvalds continued, ‘as I
mentioned a month(?) ago, I’m working on a free version of a
minix-lookalike for AT-386 computers. It has finally reached the
stage where it’s even usable (though may not be depending on what
you want), and I am willing to put out the sources for wider
distribution.’ 19 days after the 0.01 kernel was released, the 0.02
kernel debuted with the new-found ability to run a handful of
utilities including bash, gcc, gnu-make, gnu-sed and compress.
There was no floppy driver yet, the hard disk driver was hard coded
to AT-compatible drives, and due to various buffer-cache problems
it was not possible to compile large programs like gcc from a
running 0.02 kernel…”

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