How to get the timestamp of linux kernel?

Is it possible to get a summary narrative about the Linux kernel? Would the narrative be framed around algorithms? Does it have a story? Big milestones?

• What events make the story of the linux kernel exciting? Reading the entire changelist for the last 15 years obviously isn't what the question is asking.

• Answer:

  The best reporting about the Linux kernel, by far, is done by LWN (http://lwn.net/), originally "Linux Weekly News". For a detailed view, you can't do better than browsing through their archives (http://lwn.net/Archives/). They cover a swath of the open-source ecosystem around Linux, too, so you might want to focus on the "Kernel" section of each LWN weekly edition. For a summary view, I recommend their retrospective timelines, published at the end of each year and occasionally for a longer period. Most are linked at http://lwn.net/op/TimelineIdx.lwn. The five-year 1998-2002 timeline (http://lwn.net/Articles/18472/) may be especially interesting -- the longer period allows the authors with evident glee to quote naysayers predicting Linux's irrelevance and a screenful later document its increasing prevalence. For a different summary view, you might sample the coverage of Kernel Summits through the years -- see http://lwn.net/Kernel/Index/ and scroll down to the "Kernel Summit" heading. This is the annual invitation-only conference of core Linux kernel developers, where the current issues in where the kernel is going are discussed, and LWN publishes an excellent report on each one.