Linus Torvalds says first Linux release wasn’t public

“The first actual release was not public,” Torvalds said. While the announcement was made in August, version 0.01 of Linux was released in September. Torvalds wasn’t happy with the release, but he uploaded it to an FTP server and emailed people who knew about it and were interested in it. Torvalds never made any public announcement of the actual release. He doesn’t remember the date of the release because he lost all of those emails.