Linux kernel is often mentioned as a overwhelmingly large open source software. As of this writing, the latest version is v6.5-rc5, which consists of 36M lines of code. Needless to say, Linux is a fruit of hard work of many contributors over the decades.
However, the first version of Linux, v0.01 was pretty small. It consisted of only 10,239 lines of code. Excluding comments and blank lines, it was only 8,670 lines. It’s small enough to understand and is a good starting point to learn about the internals of UNIX-like operating system kernels.
Reading v0.01 was really fun for me. It was like visiting Computer History Museum in Mountain View – finally I witnessed tales are indeed true! I wrote this post to share this exciting experience with you. Let’s dive in!
Read more here.
